Wherein I go completely Bananas (or in this case Cherries)

So, it has been a crazy month for various reasons. I am fairly confident that I can no longer string three words together (two maybe, but not three). And, all associated family (mine and my husband's) seems to their stars seriously misaligned. Why does all this matter? Well, because I think July 3 at 11:00 AM, I went off the deep end. How can I be so accurate and matter of fact about such a thing? Well, that is the moment where I reached for an enormous basket of cherries (pounds and pounds) and thought heck yeah I will be able to pit and use every one of those suckers before spoilage sets in.

Thankfully, my family loves and supports me, sometimes to a fault. Today, together, my mother and I pitted half of my bounty. And, perhaps it wasn't totally insanity. First of all, it brought out some deep-seated sense of ingenuity. With only one pitter (see C-- your mom was right, a pitter is a good thing for which to register), I decided to use a bamboo skewer encased in a plastic straw to jab out the pits. It worked like a dream.

And, for my first endeavor with the cherries, I went all-American and made a cherry pie. Even though I had cups and cups of cherries on hand, I decided to add some nectarines, black pepper, ginger, and balsamic to the filling. After much discussion with my friend M--, I decided not to use tapioca, but did add some corn starch.

While I often make an all shortening or all butter pie, this time I used Zoe Bakes recipe (from Dorie, I believe) and combined the two. The result looked lovely; though as I took it to a party, I didn't get to taste it. I decided to go with the Zoe Bakes method for lattice crust. It was very easy. My favorite tip though was to chill the pie before baking it. Really did make for a nice pie. The only change I would make is to to turn down the temperature a bit in my oven as it is convenction. Otherwise, yum.