With summer fruits, comes summer food preparation. We’ve started turning fruit into all sorts of deliciousness, including these fabulous dried cherries – these are the ‘Sam’ variety, which have an intense and slightly sour flavour. They are delicious and intriguing, so much so that Laura decided to do five different varieties in the next batch, so we can compare flavours!
We used the electric deyhdrator this time, but as soon as the weather warms up again we’ll get out the sun-drying racks. Here’s Laura using the trusty cherry-pipper to pip some Rainier, Sam, Rons, Venus and Van.
It’s a great machine; you roll the cherries down the chute and press the handle, the pips fall into the chamber below and you catch the cherries in a bowl. It makes an arduous job quick and easy. I was extremely fortunate to be given it by one of our regular cherry customers some 
years ago, and it remains one of my favourite kitchen implements. The packaging is in German – the brand is “Westmark” and it’s called a “kirschomat”.
Cherry ice-cream
We’ve also sampled the delights of cherry ice-cream, having borrowed my brother-in-law’s ice-cream maker – again, absolutely delicious! It was part of a breakfast treat provided by our wonderful wwoofers Laura, Melissa and Kirsten that included pancakes, sweet potato chips, fried bananas, maple syrup and the piece de resistance – bacon ice-cream – a curious idea that makes absolute sense when you eat it!
A few years ago we grew raspberries for pick-your-own, but the harsh weather and a fungal disease called phytophthera got the better of them. In 2008 we planted a patch of the same variety (Bogong) just for the house, using disease-free plantlets, rather than the riskier roots. They’ve struggled along in the heat and dry conditions since then, and suddenly this year have surprised us by producing a delicious summer crop before Christmas – we normally start picking about February! A meditative half hour of picking this evening produced this bowlful. You can see the bonus earwig (another surprise, as our raspberries have never had earwigs before).
After removing the earwigs, the raspberries were then turned into this pie.
It is the easiest pie in the world to make. Just bake an empty pie shell (I make the pastry in the blender which is very quick – though I was slowed down slightly by a lack of flour and having to wait until Kirsten ground some more on the bicycle flour mill!). Pop the raspberries in a saucepan, add sugar to taste (raspberries are quite tart, so you do need to taste it to make sure it’s sweet enough), then once the mixture has come to the boil, add a few teaspoons of cornflour mixed with cold water. You have to pay attention and keep mixing for a few minutes to make sure the mixture doesn’t go lumpy, then cook for a few minutes until it’s gone clear again and there’s no floury taste left. I didn’t have quite enough raspberries to fill the shell, so I added some bottled apple I had left over from last year to pad it out a bit. Bit of cream on top – yummmm.
