Cherry Bomb

My apologies, gentle readers, for not posting for a while.  To keep a long story short, I'm visiting Family of Ken right now, so traveling has kept me from posting.

Anyway, I'm back with something great.  Aunt and Uncle of Ken have an orchard next to their house.  I cannot remember a time when it produced more than apples and a few cherries, but this year, the cherries are going crazy.  Aunt of Ken reports that the cherries are hanging in clusters like grapes and they have picked more cherries than any of us has ever seen in our entire lives.  When everyone came for Sunday dinner, they brought us about four quarts of freshly picked beautiful red cherries:

They were a little tart to eat out of the bowl and we needed to use them quickly, so I made cherry juice this morning while it was cool.  Here are the rinsed cherries in the Magnalite pot, ready to go:

I filled the pot with cold water just until the cherries were covered:

I put the pot on the stove between medium and medium high heat:

I brought it up to a simmer and cooked the cherries until the skins split and they released their juices:

Getting close to being done:

There isn't much left of the actual cherries anymore:

Now it's done:

While the cherries finished rendering their juices, I put a clean piece of cheesecloth in a strainer over a large measuring cup:

Using a ladle, I drained the cherry juice a little at a time:

I let each batch drain thoroughly and then I carefully dumped the cherry skins and pits out, put the cheesecloth back into the strainer, and then repeated the process.  We ended up with just under nine cups of cherry juice to freeze so that Mother of Ken can make jelly this fall:

Thanks, Aunt and Uncle of Ken!  We may be getting fresh blueberries tomorrow and I'm so excited--I love summer ;-)