MY 1st EXPERIENCE with CHOKE-CHERRIES

 

Late last week a very good friend passed on to us, 5 pounds of Choke Cherries, that she had gotten from another member of the Knights of Columbus.

I had never eaten them or even worked with them, so I knew it was going to be an adventure.

1st thing was to remove the stems and leaves. Phyllis said she popped the pit out at the same time.  Me, being a know-it-all, thought that certainly there was a tool to get the pits.   Boy was I wrong!!  

Following a recipe from the internet, I cooked them until they were soft, so that they could  easily be mashed through a strainer, sieve or food mill.

The strainer just let the juice go through and the pits got caught in the food mill.  Yee gads what a mess of this real, rich looking juice and fruit, that I know would stain our fingers, something awful.

At this point the fruit was still hot but we decided to let t cool and follow Phyllis's lead to do each one individually (daunting job to say the least!)

That worked but took the 2 of us, a few hours.  Fortunately we had plastic gloves!  

At times I can be alittle OCD and was curious how many cherries there actually were.  So we weighed 1 oz of pits and then all the pits.  There were over 4000 cherries that we had to touch them 2x.

  

 

The end result was 10 cups of fruit that I made into 4 pints and 5 -1/2 pints of jam and a pie.  The pie was yummy.  

Last year for our Christmas open house we heated Brie in the oven with raspberry jam on top and served with crackers.  This year I want to try it with the Chokecherry jam, maybe with some orange mixed in.