14 June 2020

Le temps des cerises

The cherry season is notoriously short. Gather ye cherries while ye may...

There are two kinds of cherry trees around our hamlet outside Saint-Aignan: sour cherries and sweet cherries.
You can just eat the sweet ones right off the tree.

The sour cherries are cooked or made into jam. The most traditional way to cook them is to bake them in a clafoutis,
which is a kind of custard tart. There's a recipe here.

Walt has made two clafoutis over the past 10 days, using sour cherries our neighbors invited us to pick on their property.
This is a good year for cherries. If we don't pick them, birds will.

Another neighbor has a couple of huge trees just covered with sweet cherries in her yard. She doesn't seem to pick them any more,
now that her mother has passed on and her daughter has moved away. It's a shame. You'd need a tall ladder to get to them.

14 comments:

  1. Or you can make delicious Hungarian sour cherry soup! There are many recipes online...It's served chilled with sour cream.

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  2. I would probably like the sour better than the sweet. They sound good in jam. Easy to tell which is which just by looking at the tree?

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    1. The sour cherries are smaller and the sweet cherries are plumper, with a dark red color.

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  3. There is clafoutis in your near future.

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  4. Beautiful!!

    I LOVE cherries.. I also love walking around our neighbourhood and spotting bright, red cherries in people's gardens.. I always wonder to myself.. How to they get all of them down, when way up so high.. Do people every get tired of eating their own cherries? I would bake cherry pie after cherry pie!! YUMMM!!

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    Replies
    1. The cherry season is so short that it's hard to get tired of them.

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  5. Cherry preserves are delicious. I agree with chm who sees a clafoutis in your future.

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    1. Not clear if CHM is talking to me or Diogenes. No matter, though, because I have two clafoutis in my recent past.

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    2. Ken, maybe I should have said, There is more clafoutis in your near future?

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    3. We have already picked, cooked, and eaten all the cherries that we can reach without hauling a ladder aound the hamlet.

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  6. Sour cherry soup!? Wow, I hope you consider making it, Ken, and show us the results, please!

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