Weekends--a mixture of business and rest: 4-H, family reunions, teen parties, star parties, Sunday afternoon naps.
But the weekend is over and the week is here.
We need to make jam, jello and pies from the cherries, mulberries, and black caps we've been picking. My cherry bushes have been loaded with Nanking Cherries--those little cherries that take an hour to pit out four cups for one pie. I had the boys help. I used a recipe that my mother-in-law gave me; I have no idea where it originated. It can be used for any fruit pie you'd like to try, and an uncooked, refrigerated fruit pie seems especially good in the heat of the summer:
Fresh Fruit Pie
Stir
and pat these ingredients into a pie tin:
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup oil
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons milk
salt (I always love it when it just says salt. I add a couple of shakes with
the salt shaker and make it do. I suppose this is comparable to the "pinch
of salt" in the old cookbooks.)
Bake at 400 degrees
for 10 minutes. Allow to cool.
Slice fruit into cooled crust (peaches, cherries, strawberries, berries...)--it
takes something close to 4 cups for a 9", 3 cups for an 8".
Stir together:
1 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
Add 1 cup water and cook until thick; remove from heat. Stir in 3 tablespoons
of Jello (the powder) that matches the fruit. Cool and then poor this mixture
over the fruit in the pie tin. Refrigerate until set.
Enjoy :).
The garden needs hoeing, I need to pay the bills, I have letters to write and trips to make.
Sometimes I long for the lazy days of summer that I had as a kid.
While picking cherries the other day, I realized that I probably still have them in many ways; how many people get to pick cherries for an hour, listening to the birds, smelling the fresh mowed lawn, watching the donkey protect her herd nearby?
Go in search of beauty in the world that surrounds you...
