In A Pickle... And Loving It!

As most of you probably know by now, I have been busy pickling cherries.  The season here is short, but sweet... and affordable!  I was flipping through one of my canning books looking for things to do with sweet cherries (as opposed to tart, or pie, cherries which are used for jams and jellies) and came across a recipe for pickled cherries.

That begged a question; how does one go about taking the stones out of cherries?  Well, I suppose you could go to the store and pay $8 (and up) for some sort of purpose-built tool that you're only going to use once in a while, or you could do what I did and talk to Daniel.  Then what happens is Daniel takes a bit of a stroll around the interwebs and comes up with a plan (of course he did; if ever you need a plan, talk to Daniel).

He rummaged around in the shed and found a guttering nail, which is rather long and made of aluminium.  He cut off the pointy bit, and drilled a wee hole in the end.  Then he got a beer bottle (an empty one), and my cherry pitting operation was ready to go.  All I had to do was pop a cherry on top of the beer bottle, and press down.  The stones went right into the beer bottle, which I thought was pretty cool:

I was surprised at how quickly it went.  Although not all of the cherries were perfectly pitted like this one:

I soon wound up with a big bowl of cherries, ready to be pickled:

The pickling mixture included vinegar, a little bit of sugar, cloves, cinnamon, and allspice berries.  I forgot to add the fresh ginger the recipe called for, but I just popped that into the jars when I was ready to process them.

Of course I picked an atrociously hot day to do this in an uninsulated house that has no air conditioning, but oh well.  I sweated gently (okay, copiously) as the brew bubbled away and I brought my canner to the boil:

I thought the cherries looked quite lovely boiling away:

I spooned them into (sterilised - which meant the oven was on, too) jars, added the lids and rings, and into the canner they went for their allotted time.  As I recall, I went outside at this point so I could cool down a bit.

And here's the finished product:

They are absolutely delicious; I'm only sorry that cherries don't get cheap enough for you all to justify pickling them for yourselves (I'd bring some over, but the Australian Quarantine Service won't let me).  Aileen suggested them as an accompaniment for cheese and just about any meat you might like to mention.  I agree!  I also think, having eaten more than my fair share of them, that they would go well with a good quality vanilla icecream.

And as a bonus to all the sweat and grime (it took me nearly a week to get the stains out from under my fingernails), they took second place in the category of pickled fruit at this year's Western Idaho State Fair.