So, I've been inundated with cherries. Nope, not complaining and not looking a gift horse in the mouth. I've been making *all* the cherry things. What I did want to write about is the cherry pit problem. As much as I love my cookery books, every once in a while, I want to shake things up a little so I look up a recipe here or there online. Some of my go to sites include thekitchn.com and food in jars, when it comes to canning. I also make use of the various web resources offered by extension offices and am so grateful for them. So, big shout out there but that's not what I'm here to write about either. It's the pits. Yep, cherry pits. On a fair few pages, there are alarm bells and exclamations warning about the dangers of cherry pits. Cyanide people, cyanide (basically- I know there's more to it than that but that's the gist. Cherry pits=cyanide). I found this as I was contemplating some kind of cherry syrup or something. Don't cook the cherries with their pits because DANGER! never one to want to poison people, I diligently pitted 14 cups of cherries. 14. Cups. This is not a small undertaking, even with a decent pitter. Pitting that many cherries offers a lot of time to think. And in that thinking time, I thought about the cherries I ate growing up. Canned, many, many many, jars of canned cherries. And the pit wars we used to have because my mother didn't pit cherries - ever. Tangent: you can imagine the pit wars. Three kids storing cherry pits in their cheeks as they devour sugary, juicy canned cherries. They store up as many pits as they can (swallowing a fair few in the process) and when their cheeks could hold no more, they turn their mouth into something resembling a machine gun and gun down their siblings... with pit. Gross but also awesome. Back to the pits. So when I considered pits in the context of the comments (even the tiniest exposure could kill you or make you sick), in the context of my childhood (granted, some people said it's find to swallow them because whole, there's no issue but if they're broken open, you're in trouble), and in the context of the canning I've done in the last decade (many missed pits that ended up broken by the food processor or immersion blender), I started wondering what the risk was really. Now, I'm not one of those "I have been canning green beans for years without pressure canning and nothing's ever happened so..." types. I'm a researcher, I understand probability. So I researched. The first thing I found was that many people had blog posts and opinions about the risk of cherry pits but not a lot of actual science about pits being a risk. So, I turned to my favourite canning resource -the National Center (it's hard not to spell that Centre) for Home Food Preservation. I love this organization and they are the peeps in the know. So, the first recipe I looked up was this one: http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can_07/cherry_jelly_liquid.html It actually says "do not pit". Interesting. I thought I would look further and see if there was a single warning about pits on their site. While I didn't conduct an exhaustive search, I saw enough to reassure me that the authorities see no risk whether the pits are whole or happen to get broken. There's no "if you have a piece of a pit in your jam, get it out right away" and/or "this jam is now contaminated". And they absolutely would warn you if that was the case. Now, I am not a food scientist, nor am I a domestic science expert and always suggest that people do their own research. I'm also grateful that people are trying to keep each other safe - that's not a bad thing. I'm just pedantic and don't like misinformation flying around. So, if you love cherries and you don't love research as much as I do, you can go to one of these sites: http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can_07/cherry_jelly_liquid.html http://extension.oregonstate.edu/fch/sites/default/files/documents/sp_50_883_preservingcherries.pdf http://extension.psu.edu/food/preservation/safe-methods/cherries and follow the directions of the experts. But for the love of Pete, do not let a fear of pits stop you from this kind of deliciousness! Happy canning! Stock. Yep, so glamorous. So this is the result of a chicken carcass and a turkey carcass cooked for two days on the woodstove until this was all that was left. Carcasses + water and that's it. None of the "add carrots and onions" and so on. Just water and carcasses. But when you add the carcasses DO NOT fail to add the skin and fat. First of all, those are not unhealthy fats but even you're adverse to the them, they're where a huge amount of the flavour hangs out. So, cook the stock with all of the bits intact and then toss them after. And you can skim off the fat once it' cooled but again, that's going to impact the flavour. Of course, this not only made for the most delicious, "just add a pinch of salt and you're good to go" stock but also left us with chicken stew and dumplings, many meals for the faithful farm dog, and some love bone ash that's great for the garden and greenhouse. Just be sure you have an epically large stock pot for the cooking. It makes a huge difference to have lots of water and a long, slow simmer. So, we have two freezers. In theory, I'd be able to empty one in the summer by consolidating them. This year, thanks to a pig and a quarter cow, I wasn't able to do that. In addition to the strange and random package sizes that having all of this meat brings, I also freeze in jars. So, you can imagine the organizational shuffling that has to happen in my freezer. And the catastrophic sliding around of things at times. Ugh. So yesterday, when I cleaned out one freezer in the hopes of consolidating, I was trying to find a way to keep the jars from falling whenever the support of the neighbouring jar was extracted. So first I tried the five gallon bucket method. I know that technically that means there's a bunch of wasted space but I thought I'd be able to pack stuff all around them. It was way too much wasted space that no amount of packing around could compensate for. And yes, ideally I would have defrosted and gotten rid of that snow in there but because the other freezer is pretty full too, I had nowhere to store the food while I did that. As I was puzzling until my puzzler was sore, I came up with a couple of other ideas. One is to make some broth out of some of the bones etc. that I just threw in the freezer. The other was that I remembered that I had some of those wire grid storage things that tend to be more frustration than anything else most days. So... I grabbed them to deploy. My verdict? Awesome. Now I just have to do the other one...
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AuthorI'm a 40-something writer and smallholder living in the wilds of BC with my family, our small herd of Nigerian Dwarf Goats, chickens, ducks, dogs, and cats. Archives
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