Cherry Season Is Upon Us!

Cherry season is upon us. Today I took my boys to go pick at a local orchard. They had a blast picking what they could reach. They're not quite tall enough to reach the ripest ones. We still came out pretty well though. We came home with 18 lbs.

So now I'm plagued with the question of, "What am I going to do with all those cherries?" Well, there are the obvious few right off the bat that I can think of. Cherry pie and cherry cobbler I think are about the most popular way to use cherries.That and making pie filling (to the right is a picture of the filling I made with all my leftover cherries - 19 pints)

Since I have so much, I'm trying to branch out a bit from those great ideas. I did some searches today and for pastries came up with cherry oatmeal cookies, cherry shortcake, cherry oatmeal muffins, and even a lemon pound cake with cherry compote. I looked into canning pie filling and cherries.

I even came across a few dinner recipes. What I made tonight was pork chops with balsamic cherry sauce. It was wonderful! You can tell Mike is gone right now because I definitely don't cook like this much when he's gone. It was a little sweet, but went great with the pork.

Here's a link to the recipe I found for tonight's menu.
http://www.google.com/m/url?client=ms-android-verizon&ei=SzwdTMCuL5DOqgOxi6lO&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tablascreek.com%2Fpdf%2FTCV_recipe_porkchops.pdf&resnum=2&sa=X&source=android-home&ved=0CBAQFjABOBQ&usg=AFQjCNEXUCMV_dVJvvunUAyvSdEblySn6Q

I definitely suggest giving it a try if you are in the midst of cherry season like I am. I'm always interested in what recipes and suggestions you guys come up with too, so keep 'em coming!

Composting

It's amazing how much organic waste we put in a landfill in a year. And for some reason they don't recycle around here, so I felt obligated to do my part. So what am I going to do about it? I am going to buy worms. Yes, worms! If treated right, these little machines can eat their weight in food every day! Multiply that by about 1000 worms, and poof...no organics sent to the dump! Can you imagine if we ate that much?

It's really very simple. I'm just going to keep two plastic paint pails (with holes on all sides for the worms to breath). One with the bedding, food and worms, and the other to use when you're ready to collect their castings (worm poop, aka black gold). Then all I have to do is just wait for the magic to happen.