Food, Glorious Food (chapter 2)

Chapter 2: Cherries

There is a cherry tree in our backyard that Josh's grandparents planted many years ago. Every summer that we've lived here, the cherry tree has produced a ton of little tart cherries at the end of July. Nobody eats cherries in my family except for me. I'll usually eat a handful, and the birds eat the rest. Within one week of the cherries ripening, the cherries completely disappear because the birds love them! I've always been content with that, because I felt like they haven't truly gone to waste. But this year, I was determined to do something with them!
I looked up cherries in my Ball Preserving Book and found an easy-enough recipe for frozen cherry pie filling. The recipe only has 3 ingredients: 8 cups of tart cherries, some sugar, and a little cornstarch. It takes about approx. 500 tart cherries to make 8 cups. I enjoyed searching the tree for the best-looking cherries and picking the most ripe ones. The boys even liked helping me do it too!
The most tedious process of making the pie filling was pitting every single cherry. To keep my mind focused on the task, I counted the cherries as I was pitting them. For me, pitting 500 cherries takes about 45 minutes. Then the cherries were cooked with the other ingredients, and put into freezable containers. The recipe made enough for 2 pies.

I did the whole process again two more times, so I have 6 containers in my freezer full of beautiful red cherry pie filling! I love opening the freezer and looking at what I produced! This winter, I'm going to invite people over to partake of some of my home-made pies from scratch! I'm looking forward to eating them with people I love, and I hope that the pies will taste as wonderful as the pie filling looks!!!