Roadside fruit stand
You can’t go on a summer time roadtrip to Eastern Washington and NOT come home with cherries! Earlier this week I picked up a bulging bag of bings from this roadside stand just outside of Wenatchee. Last night we had an amazing salad of sliced and pitted cherries and arugula dressed with vanilla balsamic vinaigrette and sprinkled with crumbles of blue cheese. Note to self: cherry pitters are worth their drawer space…get one! There was cherry juice everywhere but the salad was delicious.
This week I’m in a preserving kind of mood. (Insert self-promotional plug here: Canning & Preserving Your Own Harvest by Carla Emery & Lorene Edwards Forkner, JUST OUT from Sasquatch Books) I digress…
Sunday”s project was Ruby Red cherry liquor. I got the idea from my friend MaryAnn, the Idaho Gardener. Go here for her beautiful and – I’m assuming – lip smacking recipe.
Me? I can never leave a recipe well enough alone. The pits of stone fruits (think peach, apricot, plum, cherries…) have a rich almond flavor. Indeed stone fruit and almonds are all in the same botanical family. Of course they also contain a compound that can release cyanide in the body!!! Read this article for the lowdown on noyaux, the almond like kernels found in stone fruit pits.
So anyway…back to my recipe tinkering. I reduced the amount of sugar called for to just over 1 cup; I often find homemade liquors to be too sweet and cloying which overpowers the fruity flavor. The only other change I made was to crack some cherry pits to steep along with the fruit and alcohol; I’m hoping they’ll impart a rich Amaretto-like flavor.
Great idea, right? Easier said than done, I assure you. With cherry stains still all over the butcher block counter from last night’s cherry pit wrestling, I decided to not pit the cherries before cracking the pits.
I placed about 10 whole cherries in a doubled up zip-top sandwich bag and wrapped the sealed package in a dish towel to further contain the juices. Then I whacked the whole thing with the bottom of my heavy sugar jar to “self-pit” the cherries. You guessed it… the bag popped open, but at least the dishtowel caught the juices. Not a perfect scenario but it worked…sort of. Unfortunately, the cherry pits were still intact. So, leaving them still in the bag, I hit them with a hammer – BINGO!
I put half the cherry mush and crushed pits into each jar with the remaining ingredients. Now I just need to age the ruby red elixir for 3 months to see if my experiment with noyaux worked. I hate waiting.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
What a great thing to be able to grow cherries. Grew them as a kid in northern Ohio!
I knew that about the pits/almond flavor but didn’t include it cuz our family friend who made our cherry heering didn’t add them. OK, batch #2 coming up here with the pits!!!