It's July, which means Cherry Season! This week, I finally bought myself a cherry-pitter. Every year I buy a bag of cherries because in July they are just too hard to resist, but I rarely eat the entire bag because the task of pitting (or spitting) makes me tire of them before they rot. So, every year I vow to just go ahead and get myself a cherry-pitter, even if it is a uni-tasker, but then cherries are gone from the store just as quickly as they appeared, and I forget about the pitters until the next year.
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| Browned-Butter Cherry Bars: Before |
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| Browned-Butter Cherry Bars: After |
Few recipes for cherry desserts truly require the sweet dark cherries in your markets now. They need the bright sour cherries I remember picking in Southwest Lower Michigan in the summers of my youth. Sweet cherries are best eaten out of hand, but I really wanted to craft something with them. This summer, I've purchased or been given three times as many cherries as I have ever purchased in summers past. Mostly a sweet purple-fingered happy accident, but the shiny new cherry-pitter sure does justify the purchase. Anyhow, as such, I have made a couple great cherry desserts in the past couple weeks. First, roasted sweet cherries in an amaretto sauce1 which made for a fantastic fresh yogurt topping. Next, a browned-butter cherry bar2, which was sort of a more accessible cherry clafouti, but was a much more sophisticated version of my favorite cake growing up, my mom/grandma's cherry surprise cake, made with canned cherry pie filling. Side note: I could eat an entire can of that luscious red cherry goo in one sitting. Seriously, it's one of my favorite foods on the planet, and I have no shame in saying that.
So, back to fresh cherries. Our supermarket had them on sale again this week, so I bought myself about a pound. They're definitely getting on in the season, because these don't look nearly as beautiful as the pound I bought just two weeks ago. Seasonal eating is the joy of reappearance swiftly followed by the growing sadness that the season's close is coming. Dramatic, perhaps, but it is a bigger metaphor.
Anyhow. Cherries.
I had one frozen pie crust from a quiche adventure last week. But only one. Cherry pie is very nearly always a two-crust operation; lattice top at the very least. And I was not in the mood for making my own pie crust. Most days I don't have the patience to cut butter for pie crust. It's the one thing in the kitchen (well, besides washing the dishes!) that holds virtually no appeal to me. Besides, my pitted cherries were beginning to oxidize and I wanted to make quicker work of them than all that chilling and cutting and rolling was going to take. So I switched gears to cherry cobblers and crumbles. Fruit on the bottom, crustiness on top. Fine, but I still had that pie crust in my freezer begging to be used. Which means hybrid!
I took the filling from this two-crust pie recipe but punched up the almond extract, because almond extract. Oops, as it's in the oven right now, I just realized I forgot the little scattered butter bits. Oh well.
I plopped it in my frozen pie crust, and crowned it with half of this recipe's oat crumble topping.
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| Cherry CrumblePie: Before |
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| Cherry CrumblePie: Before |
And now, world, I present to you Cherry CrumblePie. Which sounds charmingly like humble pie. Probably tastes better.
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| Cherry CrumblePie: After. I like how the crumble stayed in little pearl-pellety pieces, as opposed to flattening out across the top or else sitting like sawdust. Maybe melted butter is the key. |
I poked a fork into the liquid on the edge to make sure the cornstarch had adequately done what it was invited to do - success! Also, tastes good and cherry-almondy!
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| Don't judge; the first piece out of the pan is always the ugliest. Still tastes delicious! |
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1 I used lemon zest in place of orange and an Amaretto/water mixture in place of the wine. Marvelous!
2 The recipe I found, is actually an adaptation of this one, which is itself an adaptation of this one. Which illustrates the evolution of a recipe as each cook puts his or her own signature on it. So lovely to actually trace the etymology, as it were, which is so often lost.
Also makes me wonder, is molecular gastronomy the only truly new recipes we have right now? Is most home cooking, as we know it now, just a series of adaptations? I suppose one could argue that some of what the food physicists are doing isn't even new.
