Sweet and sour cherries.
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Nice haul. What are your plans for them?
For the sour ones, Juliet and Carmine Jewel, we will make pies, jam and/or freeze them. They are too sour to my taste.
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The red ones are so bright that they look fake.
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A very rainy day so I was busy inside. Most are are making jam with their berries but unfortunately for me one jar of jam will last 6 months so I need other uses. I did some experimenting with my 6 lbs of CJ cherries. I picked them yesterday since brown rot had started. I dried some and oddly they taste more sour to me but have a better flavor so I’ll dry some more and try a little sugar on them prior to drying. I made a cobbler but haven’t tasted it yet. I’m also trying some vinegar and sugar that will take a few weeks of processing. Will try a Clafoutis recipe when I have some time. It’s so hard getting good fruit and then when the process is successful using it all is a challenge. I just finished using last years plums that where in the freezer. I still have last years gooseberries and found some garlic I picked last year that was still good.
We made a Carmine Jewel cherry pie today. Too sour for us. Need to adjust a sugar ratio for a next pie. We pitted, vacuum-packed and freeze the rest for future use.
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We made 85 cha gio on saturday, then about half of them for dinner along with herbs, lettuce, and nuoc cham dipping sauce. The basil and mint we ate them with were from the garden, so minimal eating of self grown stuff, but still nice to put that stuff to use.
Cha gio with rice paper wrappings are as far as I know not available in Boston area. I bet there is someplace that makes them up near Lowell or Lawrence.
Nice family activity to do on a rainy day anyway, though I wish they took less time to fry!
This time we took extra measures to have as little liquid in the filling as possible. We had less burst wrappers and splattering oil than usual.
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Shiro is atleast 2 weeks away in our parts.
I usually picked Shiro around August 12-17. Once you taste other plums, you will find out that Shiro is on a milder side compared to other sweeter ones.
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What is inside?
Bean thread noodles, shrimp, tofu (substituted for pork, we have some non-pork eaters), grated jicama, onion, green onion, tree ear and shitake mushrooms, egg, spices, fish sauce.
We make the recipe from Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, by Andrea Nguyen:
It is very tasty. My wife’s mom is from Vietnam but she has no interest in or skill at cooking, so we have to learn how to do it another way.
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I will buy the wrappers and ingredients on my next trip to the Asian market. Sounds delish!!!
Well again that got me wondering. I have Shiro grafted to two different pilum trees. On one of my trees it is still green and looks at minimum 2-3 away. But on my other tree these guys are mostly ripe. Could I have two different plums? I believe ACNs ripening chart has Shiro a week behind Methley which is now ripening for me. I’m in the same geographical region as ACN so I assume their chart should be pretty accurate for me.
Are there any other yellow plums that could come earlier than Shiro that this plum could be? I can tell you for certain are no bigger than Methley. Quite similar in size actually.
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Shiro is bigger than Methley when thinned. Mine was even bigger than Laroda (unlike Jose’s Laroda).
I wait until Shiro turned deeper yellow, not mellow/mild yellow when I picked.
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Lots of kale today! Also harvested some nice radishes and broccoli raab (need to plant another succession), but kale is the biggest thing going at the moment.
I felt like the flavor was fine. Definitively pretty mild but good sweetness. But already boarding on too soft for my liking. Don’t get me wrong, my kids will love them and they seem to produce well so it’s a keeper.
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Dave,
Everybody like things differently. It is important that your kids like it. That’s the most important thing, in fact 
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