Keeping Up With My Speed-Of-Light Life

I've been up to all kinds of gardening and cooking-related mischief late last week and over this weekend! Hopefully I'll have time to write about it all soon.

In the meantime, here's a quick rundown of what I've been doing and making:

• Acted as a tomato matchmaker (I can't wait to share this with you)
• Foraged for about 9 pounds of wild black raspberries (and I have the scratches to prove it)
• Scouted out some potential wild grape foraging locations
• Pitted cherries (I don't even want to know how many more pounds I have done)
• Made both black-raspberry and black-cherry vinegar
• Made both black-raspberry and black-cherry shrub
• Made both black-raspberry and black-cherry jam
• Made both black-raspberry apple and black-cherry apple crumble (can you guess what I'm overloaded with?)
• Made a yummy garden cucumber salad
• Collected an egg that I highly suspect to be a double-yolker (we'll see)
• Started hand pollinating my hard-shelled gourds (it's a nightly ritual)
• Ate the first fava bean of my life (and I don't appear to suffer from favism)
• Got a great idea for a new blog (that may or may not come to fruition)

Dried Cherries

I recently procured about 12 pounds of sweet cherries from a woman a work. She is in charge of all of the IPM (integrated pest management) and pesticide application in the teaching and research greenhouses on campus. Throughout the summer, she regularly gets crates of produce leftover from various research projects and brings them in to work for everyone to share! The latest item was sweet cherries. I originally took a 3 pound bag home, but I noticed that there were still some hanging around going into the holiday weekend. Cherries don't have the longest shelf-life, so I "rescued" a couple more bags. 

My boyfriend and I ate our fill of cherries for several days, so I'm putting the rest in the dehydrator so we can use them later in baked goods and in salads.

My friend and colleague Cathy gave me this great tip for pitting cherries. Use a paperclip! The trick is that you have to get just the right sized paperclip. I think there are about 3 standard sizes and I ended up using the smaller end of the largest size paper clip.  I enjoy picking Cathy's brain about cooking, canning, and gardening because I always learn something new!

I looked in the instruction manual for the dehydrator and was surprised to see that cherries had the longest drying time of any fruit listed (18 to 26 hours). My homemade beef jerky only took like 6 hours! The long drying time is actually kind of nice though because I have been able to start the cherries in the evening and leave the dehydrator running all night and all day during work.