Cherry Picking Season

Karen and I went cherry picking last night—in our backyard. Who knew we had two giant cherry trees back there? I certainly never noticed. Or perhaps I did, but had quickly concluded that they were merely “poison berries?" Who knows. Luckily our friend Carol was over recently and clued us into the fact that there were hundreds of nearly-ripe cherries growing in our backyard. And for an avid pie maker like myself, the news was sheer bliss.

Last night, the cherries finally seemed ripe for the picking. But, we pondered, how do you pick cherries when they are so high up in the trees, and you don’t have a ladder? We began by laying out a huge blue tarp and started shaking the trees, which proved fruitless (pun intended). Then Karen climbed up in the tree, picked them from the top branches, and thew them down at me (the moving target, of course). I worked to collect the cherries form the tarp and pick from the lower branches. The higher Karen climbed, the more scared I became, as I feared she was going to fall and drop all of the cherries. And, simply put, what was I going to do with smashed cherries?

After a thousand mosquito bites and various tree lacerations, we had picked what we hoped would be enough cherries to make a pie. My plan is to make a cherry pie over the holiday weekend, after I make a maple pie tonight in celebration of Canada Day.

I then spent an hour pitting our cherry collection, and although, don’t get me wrong, I think the cherry pitter is one of the most useful kitchen utensils there is, the repeated activity made me weary and never want to see a damn cherry again.

So although it was fun to pick cherries for the first time, and will no doubt be cool to made a truly homemade pie, I am now, more than ever, thinking it is worth any expense to buy a bag of cherries from the farmer’s market, or better yet, a frozen, pitted bag from Brennan’s or another gourmet food grocer/fruit market. I’ve had the experience, and now, I only want the cherries. Just pick ‘em for me, and pit ‘em while you’re at it.