Chokecherry Success?

A friend of mine mentioned to me a while back that she had a cone-shaped strainer and pestle.  She has graciously allowed me to borrow it to try my hand at it with my chokecherries.  She also harvested a bunch of chokecherries this summer/fall but she didn't try the strainer with hers as she was just making jelly.  I, on the other hand, would like to make fruit leather, which takes pulp not just the juice.

Yet again optimistic, I threw a spoonful of chokecherries into the cone and went to work.  The result?

Pulp into the bowl and whole pits and skins left in the cone!  I wouldn't mind putting the skins in, too, if I can figure out how to best do that, but for now I call this a success.  

The Chokecherry Saga Continues

Last week, after quite a bit of research on a good, mechanical way to remove the pits from the pulp, skin, and juice of chokecherries, we thawed out a few bags of chokecherries to attempt to make some chokecherry leather, which we've heard is very good and highly nutritious.  I was optimistic as I read that several people simply remove the spring from their Victorio food strainer and it works the chokecherries through just fine.  Well, we don't have a Victorio but I thought maybe it would still work to just remove the spring from our Kitchen Aid Fruit and Vegetable Strainer for my stand mixer.

I put a spoon of chokecherries in the hopper and turned it onto the slowest setting.  It was going okay but didn't even get any of the juice/pulp to drop into the bowl before I started hearing the pits breaking.  Defeated, I turned it off to avoid any permanent damage to my machine and cleaned it all up.

For the next several days, I tried to come up with something else that might work.  I have, through that research, discovered that the plains indians just crushed the pits up and dried it with the leather.  Apparently, the process of drying (cooking, essentially) removes the potential for cyanide to be present, so then the pits are safe to eat.  I still haven't tried this yet as I have another method I'm going to attempt first.

In the process of this research, I found a Crow Indian recipe for chokecherry cake that I decided to try.  It calls for just one cup of crushed, pitted chokecherries.  I decided to do that by hand, which took about an hour.  (Definitely not going to be doing this by hand for all of the gallons upon gallons of chokecherries we have in our freezer!)

Once that was done, it was a quick cake to put together, though I did cook it in a 9 x 13 pan instead of the angel food cake pan it says to use.

I wasn't quite sure how good it would be but I was serving it to some friends of ours anyway!  I worried a little about not having any kind of frosting over top, but what I would have done was a mix of Cool Whip and chokecherry syrup only we didn't have any Cool Whip.  It went over really well, though, and we had only about 1/3 of the cake left at the end of the night!  My husband said I could definitely make it again.  Next time I plan to try it with the frosting.

.....And We're Back!

Wow.  We got our household goods in September.  Soon after, we had a small flurry of visitors.  Then came the holidays and travel to see family in the lower 48.  It's amazing how quickly the time flies.  There are a lot of things to post about and I plan to make the time here in the next few weeks.

For now, I have to go get the kids up so we can get ready to go play in the Kids' Ice Park and watch some of the sculpting at the World Ice Art Championships.  We attended the 2011 championships and had a blast, so we're really looking forward to it again.  And today is a beautiful 32° out there.