At least here fruit seems to have a good year. We went to my parents to pick cherries. Within an hour, we had approximately 10kg in our buckets, and you didn’t notice when you looked at the tree. Sadly, the rest will be for the birds. Probably good news for the birds.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Removing the pits was much more work, and I only did so with parts of them. I froze 1 kg for #1’s birthday cake (who the fuck allowed her to turn 15 next week?), weighed 1 kg for jam (with brown sugar, orange peel and a hint of lavender), and another kg for “Kerschepannekuche” (cherry pancakes)
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Cherry pancakes are a traditional treat here in summer, usually served with potato soup, same as apple pancakes in autumn. My gran used to make amazing ones (though she smartly left the pitting to the eaters). The problem with gran’s recipe is that it got never written down. It was one of the things she just knew how to make (her infamous cheesecake recipe started with “You take flour”). I think that by now I’m a decent enough cook to have recreated it. And yes, I wrote it down.
For 4-8 people, depending on whether you’re serving soup alongside or whether some of them are black holes disguised as teenagers:
250 g butter
100 g sugar
-> beat creamy
6 eggs
-> add 1 at a time
vanilla to taste
700g flour
2 tsp baking powder
a pinch of salt
approximately 300ml milk
-> add to batter, starting with flour. Your batter should be somewhat runny, but not thin as for thin pancakes. More like American pancakes.
1 kg cherries
-> add to batter, place 1 big tbsp of batter into a hot skillet and fry in a little oil or butter.
Look for a Leifheit Cherry Pitter, I’ve had one for years and other than having to replace the rubber washer every year they work great!
Here’s a link to the manufacturers web page but you should be able to pick one up in a decent kitchen store near you: https://www.leifheit.com/en-en/stoner/16882/cherry-pitter/37211
Hmmm, Kerschepannekuche. Funny, this is the same in the palatian german accent.
The “You take flour and some eggs and…” recepies are the best. I found myself baking and cooking like that over the last 2 years… .
CrazyRussianHacker tests out all the cherry pitters (but not the hard straw or paperclip methods). If nothing else he has mad unboxing skilz. :D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR2YeWm5ViI
@3 He ignored the rubber washer, that wipes the blade after each stroke. But you can see how fast it works.
We originally got one when visiting friends in the Westerwald who had several black cherry trees in their yard. We picked a bunch of cherries and they pulled out the pitter so we could make kirschtorte. We had never seen such a marvelous pitter…
This feels now like a summer blog, made of strawberries, cherries… But then there are Charly’s steely knives (I’m not sure if they could kill the beast).
I guess there will be some very well sated birds.
For a dessert, some headbanging music from year 1700:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty2B8cQtIU4>La Follia by Corelli