Cherry Jam with Rosemary

Cherry season it is. A week ago the cherry season was only starting and the cherries weren’t ripe. But we were eager and the cherries tasted very good already so we decided to start the picking season early. We have been eating cherries like crazy this past week. Every time we walk into the garden we take a detour to the trees to pick a handful to keep us company in the garden. When we go out somewhere and take the car, we pick a bag, to go along with us for a small picnic we might have. I have also made cherry popsicles which were a big success. The first thing I made last week was some cherry jam. We opened the jar today for the first time and it was instant success!

And so easy to make. You find yourself a tree with sweet cherries, pick five hands full of them and then hop over to this non-recipe to read how to make the cherry jam. I used that recipe as a guideline. At the end I used a little bit less sugar and now that I’ve tasted it, I would use even less. But that depends a bit on how long you want to keep the jam. We don’t plan to keep it long.

What I also did differently was that in the second turn of cooking – the sugar turn – I added three small sticks of rosemary and cooked them along with the mixture for a minute or ten. I then took them out carefully so that all the green parts would be taken out of the jam and continued the cooking as explained in the recipe.

It was a piece of cake really and it tastes delicious. I’m especially happy that I added the rosemary since that adds a bit of flavour to it. The cherries were not ripe enough for jam, but in this way they were perfect. This is only the second part of the cherry adventure. Since the tree is still 90% full you will find many more cherry episodes on this blog the upcoming time. I can give you a little sneak peak of the end of this adventure: we will be fed up with cherries and we’ll move on to the next – tomato – adventure.