Our elderly neighbour invited us over to pick all of the sweet cherries off the top of the her tree. We now have tons, that need to be used right away... they are very ripe. I thought we would eat them fresh, but we certainly ended up with more than that.

-- Marci B. (daleb@kent.net), June 29, 2000

Answers

Marci, truly you have a windfall!!! I am jealous, I can't wait for the prices to drop on the sweet cherries here. I usually buy 20-40 lbs, for canning, eating, dehydrating, eating, baking, eating...well, you get the picture! I reccommend checking out a good food preservation book (or ten) out of the library and get some ideas out of there. I have made pie filling (I know, sour makes better filling, but mixed with other fruits, it can be yummy), spiced cherry preserves (almost a pickle), brandies cherries (poured over vanilla ice cream, it is close to heaven). The dried cherries are wonderful used in place of raisins in just about any recipe - sweet as well as savory.

Enjoy your bounty - contact me if you'd like any recipes I have in my books, or titles of the cookbooks I used.

Judi

-- Judi in CT (ddecaro@snet.net), June 29, 2000.

What a lucky lady you are! I dehydrate mine, too. Sadly, they are so good that they were gone in less than a week. And I found myself not giving in to the kids. Mom wanted her share.

Pit and halve the cherries for best results. Happy snacking!

-- Pam Pitts (msjanedoe@hotmail.com), June 29, 2000.

Thanks for the ideas. Good thing this is only once a year... we now have enough cherry jam ( elderly neighbours recipe, yum), dehydrator and oven full of drying cherries, and frozen, pitted halves in the freezer to last forever. I do consider myself very lucky to have these given to us. I have to kill the neighbours old cull hens, but other than that these are freebies!!

-- Marci B. (daleb@kent.net), June 29, 2000.

We have tons of cherries .... one thing I do is put them in jars (whole) fill the jar with water and sterlize them ( don't remember how long , but about 5 minutes). It is great in the winter to pop open a jar, drink the water , which is like juice, and chow down on cherries as a snack .... good and easy and no sugar neccessary!

-- kelly (kellytree@hotmail.com), June 30, 2000.

I'm sooo jealous! I live in WV and our sweet cherries were gotten by frost this year. I didn't get a single one! The ones that WERE available, were $10 a gallon!!! I tried to talk a friend of mine in Canada (who just picked 80 gallons) into dehydrating them for me, but no such luck. Does anyone that has an overabundance want to dehydrate some for me?

-- Misha (MishaaE@aol.com), June 30, 2000.

They're $.99# here this week. Drying them is my favorite way. I also use them in fruit soup. I'll post the recipe afterwhile if anybody wants it. Kids really eat it up and it's a good way to use too much ripe fruit.

-- Cindy (atilrthehony_1@yahoo.com), June 30, 2000.

Canned Cherries

Make a syrup of 1 part honey to 3 parts very hot water. Pour into jars filled with cherries. Put jars into a boiling water bath for 20 minutes. Seal.

-- Brad (Rodent@worldpath.net), July 01, 2000.