A few weekends ago, I went to Hartland Orchards in Virginia with AM and LC. We went cherry picking. Apparently, the season for sour cherries started that day. There were lots of families at the orchards with tubs to collect the cherries and ladders and stools to reach the cherries at the top of the trees.
We didn't have that foresight. Still, at a dollar a pound, we collected the cherries. As I learned there, sour cherries are best for pie-baking. They're not very sweet. But I'll be honest, I had one there and it was only a bit tart, not sour at all. In fact, it almost bordered on sweet. But since I'm not a big fruit-pie baker, I thought about the other things I could possibly make -- maybe muffins, a sauce, come up with a drink. What won out in the end -- and i was inspired by the hot weather -- was a granita and popsicles. If you're wondering what a granita is -- it's a semi-frozen dessert -- like an italian ice with a coarser texture --
instead of letting it set and freeze like a popsicle, every hour I would scrape it from the sides with a fork. After about 3 hours it gets a beautiful texture. I used OJ, honey, water, sugar, fresh blueberries and about a pound of sour cherries. I blended all the ingredients together with half the fruit until it was smooth puree and then added the other half of the fruit. The end result is that the popsicle had some little bits of fruit running throughout. I've got a couple of other popsicle recipes that I want to try.
If the weather stays hot in DC, I think I may have found my summer "cooking" project. Some of the other flavors that sounded good or intriguing include: wild-Berry Pops (yogurt based), minty grape pops, mexican chocolate pops and ginger citrus pops.
I spent an hour and a half weeding, moving vines so that they'd be trained to spread inward (which I didn't think you could do) and not over the aisles, and picking ripe veg. It reminded me of my grandfather's garden. It was really my Dad and Grandfather's garden in our backyard. There is this picture of me and my next door neighbor KvZ when we were like 5 and 4 or 6 and 5 holding zucchini from the garden and it was literally half the size of us (well, KvZ). I miss that garden -- granted I didn't appreciate at the time, like so many other things, but I remember the squash, lettuce and peppers that grew there and that I did in fact eat. 
The garden at work had a lot of herbs and veg: squash, okra, onions (which actually sit right on top of the soil, which surprised me) and even corn! It was a fun reason to get only an hour of sleep. (I didn't go home and go to sleep after. I've been up all day, and plan to sleep very well!)
