Tag Archives: cherries

  • Cherry Clafoutis

    June 26, 2012

    45 Comments

    Cherry clafoutis.

    Nothing makes us happier than growing, cooking, eating and sharing our own food. But there is a slight tyranny to the seasons. If you have cherries, you are cooking with cherries, period. And our Bing cherries are at their peak, so we picked them all. One small tree gave us four large bowls of cherries…all at once. Happily, cherries lend themselves to all sorts of dishes and cocktails (and we do seem to like eating and drinking). So this week you may see cherries in all sorts of dishes. But for now, let’s start with a classic cherry dessert, clafoutis.

    Fresh Bing cherries form our orchard.

    Clafoutis is a French dessert that combines cherries baked in a light batter, often with some added almond flavor. Think of the batter as “flan-meets-pancake” and you can get an idea of the light, yet rich, texture that rightfully lets the cherries star in the dish. Originally clafoutis featured sour or black cherries with the pits still in. Supposedly the pits add extra almond-like flavor, but as we have Bing cherries and like our teeth, we put pitted Bing cherries and almond extract in our clafoutis. You can also use this basic recipe with other stone fruits or berries, but if you want to be technical it would then be a flaugnarde, but feel free to call it a clafoutis- we won’t tell anyone.

    A cherry-pitter is a useful tool if you like cherries as much as we do.

    As for the recipe, clafoutis is a classic dish and there are many recipes out there. We chose to adapt an Alice Waters recipe that adds a few extra steps, but also adds extra flavor. In this case we season and pre-bake the cherries before we add them to the clafoutis. The extra cooking improves the flavor and texture of the cherries, but also leaves behind the base of a syrup you can reduce and drizzle on top of the clafoutis at service. Good stuff. We also prefer to cook clafoutis (and many desserts) in individual ramekins, we think it looks good and makes leftovers easier to handle, but a large baking dish works for this recipe as well.

    Season the cherries for pre-baking.

    Extra cooking for more flavor and better texture- plus you get cherry juice for a sauce.

    Place a layer of cherries in the ramekins or baking dish.

    Assembling the clafoutis is a pretty easy affair. Pre-cook the cherries, save the syrup, butter your baking dish(es), place the fruit in the dishes, make and add the batter and bake. The batter is the only part of the recipe that requires some extra effort, you need to whip egg whites and then fold them into the batter for the right texture. The clafoutis bakes for about 20 minutes at 375 degrees. While the clafoutis bakes, reduce your cherry syrup for a tasty and pretty sauce. When the clafoutis is done, add the sauce, dust with powdered sugar and serve.

    Make the batter.

    Pour batter over the cherries.

    Bake until browned and puffed. Continue reading →

  • Weekly Cocktail #16: The Caipirinha / Cherry-Lime Caipirinha

    June 15, 2012

    22 Comments

    Cherry-lime caipirinha.

    Our friend Alicia over at Boozed + Infused (a great blog on homemade booze) recently posted on the concept of “gartending”. As you might expect, gartending means you are making cocktails with ingredients from your garden. So now that it has a name, we can say that we have been happily gartending for some time. One reason we like cocktails as much as we do is that we can quickly enjoy the fruit and herbs from the garden in drinks. It is always fun to enjoy the fruits of your labor, and if you get to add a bit of booze…so much the better.

    As we noted earlier this week, we are happily harvesting cherries. We are eating them out of hand, mostly, and will be baking this weekend, but once we picked them our thoughts went to cocktails. And we made a cherry-lime caipirinha. And it was good. Very good. Good enough that we decided to post the recipe.

    Cherry-lime caipirinha and ingredients.

    The caipirinha is the national drink of Brazil. It is a simple, but delightful, combination of cachaca, limes and sugar. You simply muddle about 1/2 a lime with a few teaspoons of sugar to get the juice and oils from the limes and then add cachaca and ice. While the process is simple, you get a very tasty, complex cocktail that is perfect for summer. And keeping in the spirit of Brazil, there are few rules with the Caipirinha. It is quite acceptable to add in or change the fruit or even the base spirit and still call the drink a caipirinha. And since we had cherries and we like them with limes, the cherry-lime caipirinha was not far behind.

    If you are unfamiliar with cachaca, it is basically “Brazilian rum” but it is made from sugar cane juice rather than molasses (rum agricole, made from cane syrup is somewhere between cachaca and rum). Cachaca has an overt sugar cane flavor with some heat from the alcohol and what most would call “musty” and grassy notes. That may not sound all that good, but it works well in cocktails, particularly with fruit-driven recipes. We enjoy cachaca in cocktails like the Rose Pearl, but it does mostly end up in caipirinhas during the summer.

    As for the caipirinha, the name itself loosely translates to “country-bumpkin” or “hillbilly”. And if you have a few of these your behavior certainly might “deteriorate” somewhat. The caipirinha is a great drink, the only real downside is that it is mostly booze, but goes down very, very easy. Sometimes you want to enjoy a caipirinha but not act like one, if you know what we mean…;-) Consider yourself warned and happy Friday!

    The Caipirinha / Cherry-Lime Caipirinha

    Ingredients:

    • 1/2 large lime, cut into quarters
    • 4 cherries, pitted and cut in half (optional)
    • 2 teaspoons, or more, granulated sugar
    • 2 or 3 oz. cachaca
    • Ice

    Assemble:

    1. Muddle the fruit and sugar in a cocktail glass. Add the cachaca and stir. Pour the mixture into a lowball glass and add a lot of ice. Mix and serve.

  • Orchard Update: The Cherry Harvest, Day #1

    June 13, 2012

    29 Comments

    Van cherries before harvest.

    Well after a longer wait than we expected, the cherry harvest is here! We are very, very excited, as this is the first real cherry harvest from our orchard. We netted the trees a few weeks ago and the extra work paid off. While the ants got a few of the cherries, the birds, wood rats and squirrels were kept at bay.

    Harvesting cherries is still a low-tech affair…

    Most of this day’s harvest was from the Van and Black Tartarian grafted tree. The cherries are mostly Vans. We planted the Van / Tartarian tree to pollinate the Bing cherry tree, but the bonus is another crop of cherries. The Vans look like Bings, but are smaller with slightly lighter color skin and flesh. They are sweet, but not too sweet, with a pleasant crunch.  We had a smaller crop of the Black Tartarians and they are really, really good. The Tartarians, not surprisingly, have deep purple color and flesh. The cherries are very sweet and incredibly juicy. The Tartarians are a pleasant surprise, the only bummer is that few made it out of the orchard- they were enjoyed straight from the tree. We will aim for more next year (perhaps another tree).

    Day 1: Vans, Bings and Black Tartarians.

    We also started on the Bing tree, which is dense with fruit on almost every branch. The cherries are ripening somewhat unevenly, so we will work the tree over the next few days. The Bings are a delight. There is a reason they are the most popular fresh cherry. They are big and sweet and one of the closest things to “natural” candy you can get. The kids think they are better than candy, and that says a lot. We had some off-season rain and concerns that it would cause the Bings to crack, but luckily all the fruit is in great shape. We will have fun picking the cherries for the next few days.

    Ready to eat. The Vans have the lighter color.

    While researching how to cultivate our Bings we ran across an interesting piece of history worth sharing. From Wikipedia:

    The cultivar was created as a crossbred graft from the Republican cherry in 1875 by Oregon horticulturist Seth Lewelling and hisManchurian Chinese foreman Ah Bing, for whom the cultivar is named.

    Ah Bing was reportedly born in China and immigrated to the U.S. in about 1855. He worked as a foreman in the Lewelling family fruit orchards in Milwaukie for about 35 years, supervising other workers and caring for trees. He went back to China in 1889 for a visit. Due to the restrictions of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 he never returned to the United States. Sources disagree as to whether Ah Bing was responsible for developing the cultivar, or whether it was developed by Lewelling and named in Bing’s honor due to his long service as orchard foreman.

    It seems a little bittersweet to us that Ah Bing was not allowed to return to the US. And regardless of who crossbred the cherry, it gives us a smile that Ah Bing’s work in the orchard survives and is enjoyed every summer.

    Eat out of hand, or make a cocktail. Cherry-lime Caipirinha, pretty good.

    Once we got the cherries in the house, they got a quick clean and rinse. We laid them out on the counter and ate quite a few. The kids enjoyed them and I even made a cherry-lime Caipirinha. Yum. For the next few days we will be enjoying the cherries in baked goods, perhaps ice cream, drinks and even a savory dish or two. Recipes soon.

  • Heavy Branches and the Lonely Peach

    May 29, 2012

    23 Comments

    Bing cherries, we will harvest later this week.

    We planted our stone fruit orchard nearly 5 years ago. And while there have been a few successes, this is the first year we can say the trees are “heavy” with fruit. The peaches and nectarines are in process, but the Bing cherries are truly on the cusp. We eat them daily, but the big harvest will come later this week. The limbs on the Bing cherry tree are bending under the weight of the fruit. Amazingly, this same tree yielded just a few tiny, tepid berries last year but will give us baskets of cherries this year. A small reminder that patience and effort are sometimes rewarded.

    Cherry branch bending under the weight of the fruit. This is good.

    We are pleasantly surprised by the density of the cherries.

    And sometimes there are pleasant surprises. The hybrid Van and Black Tartarian cherry tree was mostly planted to  pollinate the Bing. But, as we noted last week, this tree is also bearing fruit. The Vans are tasty and the Tartarians are just coming in. We look forward to tasting all three of the cherries just off the tree.

    Netting the tress to protect the fruit in the orchard.

    On a more sober note, we took the plunge and netted the trees in the orchard. We needed help to do this, but as most of the trees have real fruit, now is the time. The orchard is less picturesque, but is hopefully protected from some of the nighttime raids of earlier years. We’ve written about our more…ummm, “active” protection of the garden and orchard from varmints, so let’s hope the passive systems work as well.

    A flash of purple amidst the green.

    Otherwise, the apple and pear trees outside of the orchard are looking great. The blossoms of spring are now the small fruits of the tree. These are older trees that bear fruit every year. We deal with leaf curl and the occasional pest, but we rarely worry about these trees. They are in their prime. Our younger Macintosh apple is also looking good and we expect a decent crop this year.

    Pears on an older tree. Lots of fruit, but months from being ready. Continue reading →