Small treats...

[semperfiona]

I'm addicted to Bing cherries. This week at the grocery store, I paid four dollars a pound or so and bought a big bag of imported Chilean cherries, which I am currently happily consuming. They're not the small ripe crimson perfections that summer cherries are, but they'll do!

Comments

Cherries!

[neeuqdrazil.livejournal.com]

Our grocery store doesn't have any cherries. :( Can I steal some of yours?

I will quite happily sit down and eat *mounds* of black cherries. When I was a kid, my folks bought a big (5-gallon?) bucket of frozen sour red cherries to bake pies with. I used to go and dig out a bowlful almost every other day, or so, just to eat on their own.

Ooooh, we have blueberries in the freezer. Almost as good...

Re: Cherries!

[semperfiona]

You certainly can. If I thought they'd survive the shipping, and wouldn't be stopped at customs, I'd send you some. But in the meantime I'll give you some childhood memories instead.

When I was growing up in Wisconsin, we had a sour cherry tree. We used to can them, make jam from them, and just freeze them, so we had sour cherry pies pretty much all year round. I miss the taste of those pies. No cherry filling I've ever found comes close, and I can't recall seeing fresh sour cherries for sale here.

I was really sad when the cherry tree died and had to be cut down.

We also had two big apple trees, both of which are still quite alive. They produced large crisp tart apples, again the best-tasting apples I can ever remember, wonderful for pies. My mother made huge heaping pies that stood six inches above the pie tin. The apples were also delicious to just eat off the tree, and ever since I have been spoiled. Storebought apples very rarely satisfy me: they're either too sweet or too mushy.

Re: Cherries!

[neeuqdrazil.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the 'cherries' over AIM, hon. ;) And for the childhood memories, which sparked a few of my own.

My grandparents lived, and most of my aunts and uncles live in the Niagara peninsula, where there are *lots* of soft fruit orchards. Apricots and peaches and cherries and just about everything else you can imagine. That's where we would get the sour cherries. We'd go down there for a couple of weeks every summer (one summer we lived with my grandparents, actually.) We'd go to one of the local fruit stands at a farm gate, or to the market 'downtown', and buy baskets of cherries. Which I would eat, constantly. And apricots. Mmmm, fresh, ripe, juicy apricots...

I think our grocery store had sour cherries this past summer, actually, but I didn't buy any - being a student, and broke, has some limitations. And the cherries I get in the grocery store don't taste nearly as good as the ones from the market, or from the farm-gate stand.

My uncle (the one who doesn't live in Niagara) has an apple orchard, and every year we'd go to the farm and help with the apple picking. The adults got paid in beer, and the kids got paid in apples. Nothing tastes as good as a MacIntosh fresh off the tree.

We have a Mutsu apple tree in the backyard at home. They're *huge* apples, and really tart, almost sour.

I need to bake a pie. But I'll have to get my mother's recipe for pie crust pastry first - she makes wonderful pastry. I doubt I'll be able to get it to go quite as well, but I'll try. Mmm, fresh, hot apple pie with a slice of good, old, sharp cheddar, or some vanilla ice cream.