The First Sign of Christmas
You know that the holidays have arrived here at Chiot’s Run when you see chocolate covered cherries on the counter. I usually try to start making my famous chocolate covered cherries the week after Thanksgiving. This year, I was too busy so I started last Wednesday evening. I don’t really making cookies during this season, I spend my time making chocolate covered cherries and a few peanut butter cups. I also make a few batches of caramel corn for the wonderful people at the post office and the library.
These cherries are famous. A week or two before Thanksgiving people start asking about them, wondering if I’ve started making them yet. They want to make sure I remember to make them and they want to make sure I remember that they’re on “the list”.
Making cherries isn’t difficult, but it is time consuming, especially if you use real chocolate that you have to temper (which I use on about 2/3 of my cherries). It’s as simple as making a fondant to wrap around the cherries and then dipping them in chocolate. I’ve developed a few tips during my 10 year cherry dipping career. The fondant recipe below is the best, I’ve tried 10-15 different recipes and this is the easiest to work with because of the corn syrup. You can buy non-GMO corn syrup at your health food store if you’d like. Using anything else; milk, golden syrup, honey, maple syrup, etc. makes the fondant stickier and much harder to wrap around the cherries without a big mess!
Make sure you get the fondant fairly thin, too thick and it won’t turn into liquid. I cut the fondant into small balls and knead each piece, then flatten into a disc to wrap around each cherry. Kneading the fondant makes it smooth and warms it making it more pliable for easy wrapping. You don’t have to chill your fondant if your kitchen is cool.
I find that wrapping the disc around each cherry, then cutting off any excess before rolling works perfectly. I lightly roll them between my hands to smooth out the fondant, don’t use too much pressure or you’ll make the cherry leak juice which will turn your fondant into a sticky mess. Keeping a bowl of confectioners’ sugar close for dipping your hands and cherries into will help in case this happens. If you have a cherry that starts to produce juice too soon, simply dip in powdered sugar and then roll lightly between hands. Keep a wet rag and a dry towel around as well to clean your hands every so often. This keeps the process moving along smoothly.
I have found that putting parchment paper on the the cookie sheet and coating it with shortening makes it much easier to remove the cherries once they’re cooled and set. If you don’t do this they often stick, when when you pick them up they leave a small bit of fondant stuck to the sheet and then they start to leak juice.
Make sure you chill your cherries for at least an hour in the fridge before dipping. If you don’t allow the fondant to cool and set up, it will have a tendency to melt with the heat of the chocolate and start to drip off the cherries with the chocolate.
CHOCOLATE COVERED CHERRIES
50 maraschino cherries, well drained
3 tablespoons room temperature butter
3 tablespoons light corn syrup
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
2 cups sifted confectioners’ sugar
1 1/2 pounds dipping chocolate, white or dark
Combine butter, corn syrup and salt; blend until smooth. Add confectioners’ sugar and mix well. Knead until smooth and shiny; wrap in wax paper and chill for 30 minutes (if your kitchen is cool this may not be needed).
Meanwhile, drain cherries. Shape a marble-size piece of fondant around each cherry; place on wax paper-lined tray. Chill until firm, about 2 hours.
Melt chocolate according to kind you’re using (tempering real chocolate or simply melting to dipping consistency for chocolate coating). Dip cherries and place on wax paper-lined tray (I find those tiny muffin cups to be perfect, especially if you’re making different kinds (brandied & regular), they’re easy to keep separate if you use different colored cups for each kind). Store in covered container in a, cool dark place for 10 to 14 days to fully ripen and to attain the “liquidy” inside.
Brandied Cherries
Soak cherries in brandy for a minimum of 2 days (I soak mine for up to 1 year, but a week or two will do). Omit almond extract and add 1/2 teaspoon brandy flavoring or brandy instead. Follow recipe as stated above.
Next year I’m going to try to make my own maraschino cherries. I’m sure these will be even more delicious if I use fresh local cherries. I may even leave the pits in them to provide the natural almond flavor that comes from cherry stones. I’ll have to find a farm where I can pick them myself so I can make sure I get some with stems.
What are you famous for during the holidays? Or what is someone else famous for that you love?
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Book Report: Heirloom, Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer
“What taste I got of the kind of farming I would eventually embrace came on the mornings I helped Jimmy and Mildred King, the couple from Mississippi who have moved into Milt’s farmhouse, clear a tree-strewn patch of rocky, sloped Eckerton land. With nothing more than a shovel, they had turned every square inch of the half acre their house was situated on into a lush vegetable garden. But before Jinny could get this shovel to break the surface of the ground we made available to him, he had to clear out hundreds of trees, stumps, and rocks the size of radial tires. It was Mildred and Jimmy who first turned me on to fresh-out-of-the-ground carrots, sweet potatoes in need of no sugar, tender okra, lettuce with identifiable flavor, peas direct from Valhalla. Mildred’s basement full of canned vegetables, too. Pickled garden-fresh beets were my favorite. I would slurp the purple vinegar from the softened nuggets and then devour the tangy earth-flavored flesh. Mildred gave me some jars of pickled beets in exchange for my labor.”
-Tim Stark, Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer
Since we talked about winter reading lists yesterday, I thought I’d recommend adding Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer to your list. It’s a fantastic book about gardening and life. It’s filled with lots of laughs and a few touching moments. Tim, the author, fell in love with heirloom tomatoes while living in New York, these tomatoes took up all the space in his tiny apartment and finally the landlord made him move them. He planted on his family’s land and ended up with a glut of tomatoes, which he decided to sell at the farmer’s market. This book will be a wonderful read for anyone that enjoys gardening. Tim stories of weeding, groundhogs, tractors and mud will lift your spirits during these cold winter months when working in the garden is impossible.
What kind of books do you usually read in the winter? Gardening books, or novels?
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Winter Reading List
I have a long list of books I want to read this winter. I keep a note on my desktop (a virtual post-it) and whenever I come across a book that sounds interesting I add it to the list. I’ll request these from the library this winter and read through as many as I can. I want to read through the Little House on the Prairie series this winter. They were my favorite books growing up, so I thought it would be fun to read them again.
I really want to focus on learning more about herbal remedies and natural healing, so those books will come first. I also want to read through East of Eden again, since it’s my favorite book. What books are on my list?
I don’t know if I’ll get through all of these. I am a fast reader thanks to all those speed/comprehension drills in grade school, but I don’t know if I can finish them all.
What books are on your winter reading list, any good ones I can add to my list?
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Quote of the Day: Robert Kourick
“Though food is basic, it has become just another service.
Shopping at a supermarket, the buyer is dependent upon the limitations of modern agriculture. Supermarket produce is often mediocre – bland and travel worn. The airplane, the truck, and the train have made it possible to soothe cosmopolitan palates with almost any food, regardless of the season.”
-Robert Kourick
Check out this photo on Flickr, everything inside the fridge is labeled so you can read exactly what each item is.
I thought about this quote when I was cleaning out my fridge last week. I noticed that just about everything inside was sourced locally. Even my milk comes from only a few miles away, fresh from the cow the day after it’s milked. The last couple years our diets have gone from: a healthy diet, full of lots of supermarket veggies and fruits to a diet full of veggies and fruits from local sources. We’ve learning to love seasonal eating, not relying on broccoli for our vegetable of the week.
It’s been a wonderful adventure and I can’t imagine not eating this way. It is a bit of challenge in the beginning and can seem a bit overwhelming, but it gets easier as you find local sources for more things. I actually feel like I spend less time shopping and acquiring my food now that I do it locally and grow some of of my own. I’ll be doing a series soon about learning to eat locally, I hope you’ll share lots of great insights into your journey so we can help those that are trying to follow the same path.
What percentage of your diet is local, either from your own garden or other local growers?
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Good Old Ohio Weather
Yesterday we woke up to temperatures in the 50’s with sunny skies. It looked like a beautiful day. I was headed over to my parent’s house to pick up Mr Chiot’s deer from the processor and was enjoying the sunshine and the warm weather. I knew bad weather was coming through, so I was planning on getting home before it got too bad!
The wind picked up about mid-day and the sleet/rain/snow moved in. I don’t really mind bad weather, unless of course I’m out and about in it. I noticed a lot of downed branches and a few trees along the road (no roads blocked entirely though). I managed to arrive home before the worst of the weather hit. About 5 pm last night Mr Chiots and I were working away in the office and we heard a huge “BOOM”. We looked out the windows and didn’t notice anything. We couldn’t see any trees on any of the neighbors homes, so we went back to work. A few minutes later we noticed the sheriff down the street.
We went down to check out what was going on and a HUGE tree had fallen across the road right down the road from our house. Fortunately it wasn’t any taller or we would have lost our electric!
Mr Chiots offered to help with the clean-up, but the local maintenance crew was already on it’s way. They brought out a big backhoe to clean up all the debris.
These gusts of wind up to 50 mph make me a bit nervous. Most weather doesn’t bother me, but since our home is surrounded by massive trees, the windy weather can be a bit nerve-wracking. Of course this is why we have insurance, but it would still be a bit of a pain to have a big tree come crashing through your roof, especially on a cold rainy winter day!
This is one of the reasons we’re prepared for emergencies. Back-up heat, cash on hand, food in the pantry, we’re ready for the electric to be out for a few days or to be snowed in for a week or two. Such is life in semi-rural Ohio. That’s why Ohioan’s say, “If you don’t like the weather, wait 5 minutes.”
Any crazy weather happening in your neck of the woods?
