Cherry time

The garden starts to give fruits and vegetables. Especially fruit needs to be picked and processed.

We had already made some raspberry marmelada, and enjoyed the woodland strawberries. 

Now the sour cherries (klarbär – krieken) were ripe. They had a good taste and were totally black ready to be picked. The birds found them too. I even had to scare away a big swarm of starlings (Stare - spreeuw). We would not have got one berry left. Luckily they didn't return when I turned my back to them.

Time to start picking.

 But what to do with it?

 First take out the stones.

 

The pits stay in the container at the underside. The cherries fall in the bowl.

These are perfect fruits to preserve on sugar and vinegar.

We preserved our fruit in different ways. 

Preserving them on sugar and vinegar was the first trial. The jars we could find in the lokal supermarket. 

An others bunch of cherries were used for juice and marmelade. I use one of this old fashoned but very handy juice presses. It's made in the Czech republic. 

And emptied bowl for marmalade and a full bowl with juice.

The juice is poored in bottles and the remnants of the cherries are used for marmalade. 

Sugar and fruit starting to boil on the fire.

In a second set of cherries I made my own recipe. I had still some confit lemon slices from making the elderflower juice.  So they were poured in. Also some herbs in powder were added (cinnamon, clove,  star anise, ginger). The first tasting by my privat jury turned out into a big succes.

The result of all this cooking  was a whole corner of our kitchen table filled with all kinds of cherry products. 

And this are some of the bottles with fresh juice. The right bottle is cherry vinegar to use in cooking and salads.

Next are the red currants. 

But first cleaning upp.