Cherries

When we were back in Montana, it was the height of cherry season. We could easily find cherries for $1.50/pound at the grocery store. At the farmer's market, cherries picked the day before at a local farm were $2/pound. Since they run more like five or six dollars a pound in Texas, we had never preserved cherries before and decided we should give it a try. We went with cherry jam and cherry leather for our first try.

First we washed all of the cherries and picked off the stemsPitting cherries can be messy business, so to avoid creating a murder scene motif in my kitchen, Sierra and I put on old clothes and went outside to do the pitting. Once the cherries were pitted, we brought them back inside and I chopped them in the food processor For jam, we followed a basic sweet cherry jam recipe from The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving using powdered pectin
For the cherry leather, we followed the same basic steps we used to make the peach leather: we pureed the cherries, added some lemon juice and some honey and put it on the dehydrator. This is where things got a little interesting. The peach leather was ready about 12 hours after we put it on the dehydrator, but the cherry leather just kept being tacky, it never seemed done. Finally, after about 36 hour on the dehydrator, we decided it wasn't going to work and we just turned the dehydrator off and let it sit, hoping it would harden up enough to at least be easier to clean. Lo and behold, once it cooled, it peeled off the tray just like the peach leather had. In the future, it think it will work better to leave it on for 12-24 hours, then let it cool before trying to package it up (as opposed to the peach leather, which does best if we take it off the tray right away, before it cools).

Hoping to get back to regular daily posts by Monday!