Tuesday, August 9, 2011

The Pits

Cherry Pits that is!

When I was younger, I liked Marashino Cherries, but disliked Cherry Pie Filling. I mistakenly thought that was what Cherries taste like and for years, wouldn't eat them. Then, one day someone told me that they tasted a little like plums. I finally tried cherries and I was hooked!

Now, I love to eat cherries. Of course (it's good), my kids want to eat anything that I do. The challenge was that eating around the pit and spitting it out was no problem for me. For the kids, they were too young to do that and I had to cut the pit out. Finally, I found the tool that makes my life so much easier.

The cherry pitter.

This is one tool that I have gotten more than my value out of. It is a tool that I use every summer during cherry season. This year, my son started to use the tool himself and pit his own cherries.

You can see in the pictures that mine has a splash guard. This works great because I can set the plastic part down into my bowl and when the pits come out, the juice goes into the bowl.
I have a very full tool drawer (although I did clear it out a bit when I got this), so I really do like that it closes up rather compactly for storage too.

The other day, my manager at work gave me a basket of cherries that someone had brought in. They were a delicious dark, sweet cherry. I knew that we probably wouldn't eat them all in time since we already had a fruit-filled refrigerator, so I decided to use them up by baking with them. I didn't want to make a pie and I had some brown bananas, so I decided to make a Banana Cherry Loaf.

I served it with some Cinnamon Sugar Butter Spread. Yum! I love adding butter and cinnamon sugar to banana bread and having the convenient spread made it that much easier to share at work.

Banana Cherry Loaf recipe

This post shared at Works for Me Wednesday.





3 comments:

Mom2fur said...

I brought home some Bing cherries a while back and found out I'm the only one who eats them here. (Probably because of the pits.) So I decided to make jam with them. I cut them open with a paring knife and used my thumb to get the pit out. What a pain! I'm going to be looking for one of those pitters. Anything to make life easier!
P.S.--I mixed the cherries with pluots, since I didn't have enough for the jam recipe.

Diana said...

If you don't have a pitter and don't want to shell out the bucks for one, a tough straw or the casing for an instant-read thermometer will work too. But I'd love to have a pitter like yours! :)

Karen Delaney said...

I have never bought large quantities of cherries, but recently received a 4# box. Asked my friends on FB for the loan of a pitter (had the opportunity several times to purchase one at the local thrift shop, but what did I need it for?). My friend, Sam, loaned me one. What a wonderful, time saving gadget!