Born in the Wrong Century

We have a cool local farmer who has an online store for local goods from their farm, other farms and the closest ranches & orchards.  If you live near Bozeman, MT check out Field Day Farms, they do a great job!  When they put out their newsletter to preorder cherries I had a hard time deciding how many I should order… a case of Rainiers & a case of Lapin… just one case???  Since I harvested a lot of sour cherries and am planning on getting more sours from my Uncle’s house I thought one case would probably be enough.

A beautiful box of cherries!

A week later my 19 lbs of Lapins arrived and they were gorgeous, sweet & huge!  I quickly went to work putting them up for wintertime use so I could get back to picking huckleberries 

The case of cherries became: dried cherries, frozen cherries, spiced pickled cherries, cherry-cherry jam, belly fruit & some got shared with family.  I just love enjoying the fruits of summer but also putting some aside for later.

Here’s a quick slide show of how I processes all the cherries and below is the recipe for Cherry-Cherry Jam.  I’m still waiting a few more days to sample the pickled cherries and then I’ll post that recipe too!

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{Recipe} Cherry-Cherry Jam
Yield: 4 tall jelly jars, 2 small jelly jars + a little extra
4 cups mashed sweet cherries
4 cups mashed sour cherries
1 cup honey
1/2 cup lemon or lime juice (I used 50-50)
6 tsp pectin (I use Pomona’s Pectin because it takes less sweetener)
8 tsp calcium water (comes with the pectin)

Place mashed cherries into a dutch oven, add citrus juice and calcium water and heat to a boil.  Stir pectin into honey while you’re waiting for the cherries to come to a boil, once the cherries are at a boil add the honey.  Cook for 2 minutes to dissolve the honey and bring back up to a boil.  Ladle into sterile, hot canning jars.  Put on lids & rings and process in a hot water bath for 15 minutes (for 5k’ elevation).  Let cool and check seals.