Due to rain and highway washouts we were forced to take a rather unexpected (and LONG) detour on our last trip to visit my parents. One of the few perks to our detour is that it took us right down into cherry country and we were able to get a nice big box of local cherries for a great price.
We ate lots of them but lets face it, one family can only eat so many cherries. I already had put up 5lbs of cherries in light syrup and while we like them they aren’t really ‘wow’ing us so I didn’t want to do any more. Sitting down with my favourite canning books I didn’t come up with anything that I thought we would eat. So there I was with 10lbs of cherries and no idea what to do with them. This is what happens when you buy a whole bunch of fruit without a plan of what to do with it.
A quick google search presented two reasonable options: Freezing and dehydrating. Armed with my handy dandy cherry pitter
It was messy and time consuming business but the end result was yummy! I wasn’t sure how my kids would feel about the dried cherries so I only did a couple trays.
Big mistake, those cherries were gone before I even got them off the tray! My kids sat and ate them and then asked for more! Happy to have found a way to use them up I did the rest of the cherries the next night. I added some strawberries and blueberries to one of the trays as well, since I had them in the fridge. I would add a picture of the finished product but those never made it off the tray either.
Dehydrating isn’t quite as satisfying as canning, I did tons of cherries but didn’t even get enough to fill a ziploc bag. You can get a huge bag of dried cherries at Costco for less than $10, I’m thinking that in the future we’ll just do that.
It’s a fun easy snack though, I keep a little bowl of them out for the kids to grab a few whenever they want so I’m sure they won’t last long.
Now I just need to figure out what I’m going to do with all these apricots…
Finding Joy in the Little Things 