It was with a sense of panic that I suddenly realized this past week that the cherries and raspberries will soon be gone from the fields. We hadn't put anything by with these fruits, and the idea of going through all of fall, winter and spring without the taste of cherries or raspberries was too terrible to bear. Thus it was that this past Saturday morning, we ventured out to a local orchard. In the pouring rain. Yes, we finally got some rain. And we were wet, and cold, and the waxed cardboard tray we were given to put the berries in melted in the rain, and because I was with my Honeybunch it was fun, and we giggled and picked and wondered how crazy the kids working in the market thought we were.
It was slim picking in the raspberry brambles, but we picked about 2.5 quarts, which have since either been frozen or turned into sauce for our french toast breakfast this morning. We bought cherries from them as well. Picking our own wasn't an option, but they still had some for sale in the market. I have frozen half of the sweet and dehydrated the other half. The sour cherries are cooking down into preserves on the stove as we speak. I decided to go for the Martha Stewart pectin-free preserves recipe found here http://www.marthastewart.com/recipe/sour-cherry-preserves , which was silly of me given that it's 90-something degrees outside and I'm in here cooking cherries and sugar at 220 degrees for 40 minutes. However, it used less sugar than the other jam recipes I found online, and I did not feel like making a special trip to the grocery store just to pick up a box of pectin. The preserves are deep, deep red and, as I'm finding when I taste the foam I'm skimming off the top, delicious.
This weekend, I dehydrated/canned/froze a full bushel of corn, 2.5 quarts of raspberries, 12 quarts of sweet cherries and 6 quarts of sour cherries. It feels good to be able to say that. Make hay while the sun shines, right?
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