Cherry Pie - from tree to table

Esther took this photo of Lillia wearing Eleanor's sweater that I knitted 😊

Up until July 4th it felt like spring up here.  It was breezy, but mostly warm with scattered showers.  The cherry trees gave us our first fruit of the season.  We have two small cherry trees at the bottom of our hill.  Last year, when we moved in, the cherries were full of worms, but this year we harvested them before the annelid invasion.

Lillia and Eleanor picking cherries for pie.

I don't know what variety of cherry we have, but they are on the sour side; which is perfect if you want to make pie.  I picked up a cherry pitter at Ace Hardware, which was disconcerting because I am pretty sure that I gave the exact same contraption away right before we moved.  How was I supposed to know that my very own cherry tree was waiting for me?

Doesn't it usually seem like the ripest ones are just a bit out of reach?

The girls gathered together to start the process of making homemade cherry pie. 

We ended up with about  eight cups of cherries.

While the girls picked, I looked up cherry pie filling recipes on Pinterest.  I found a recipe that called for lemon juice, cornstarch, sugar, butter, and almond extract.  I did not have corn starch so I substituted arrowroot starch and the filling was too watery, so I threw it in the fridge and wrote 'corn starch' on my shopping list.  Then I found my pate brisee recipe and blended the flour, water, butter, and sugar together to make that fabulous concoction called pastry.

I was able to thicken the filling with corn starch and I even threw in some tapioca pearls for good measure (who wants a runny pie?).  I rolled out the the chilled dough and remembered how lovely it is to work with gluten.  After assembling the pastry and filling in my glass pie dish I placed the pie in the oven.  After about fifty-five minutes - voila, beautiful, buttery cherry pie.

A rustic and rewarding Lordsday treat

 At the beginning of July cherries and service berries were ripe and ready to be picked.  We found plentiful amounts of service berries just down the hill from our property.  We picked several pounds.  They were juicy and sweet, almost like blueberries, but with seeds. 

patriotic berry tart

A service berry and cherry tart seemed like a natural outcome to all our berry picking.  Lillia made the tart crust and I made the filling.  It turned out to be the perfect patriotic treat on the Fourth of July.