Bottling Cherries

After putting the boys to bed last Saturday, my husband and I got to work on our cherries. In September, I bought 60 pounds of cherries. They came prepitted (expected) and frozen (unexpected, we'd heard they'd be fresh). The frozen worked in our favor though since I'd bought way more fruit than my energy level could realistically can in a couple of days. So, 2 30# buckets have been taking up a LOT of a space in our deep freeze.

I pulled one bucket out last Thursday so they could thaw in time for canning on Saturday night. I was tired from working on our bathroom during the week and hanging out with friends Saturday afternoon, but my hubby and I make a great canning team and we were able to knock out the whole bucket pretty quick. Aren't they lovely?

We got 10 quarts of cherries bottled and I pulled the last batch out of the canner around midnight, so it only took about 3 1/2 hours to do! I also realized partway through draining all the cherries that we can save the cherry juice and make cherry pancake syrup (we eat a LOT of pancakes in this house). We'll save all our juice from our next bucket (cherry pie filling is the plan) and make the syrup after we're all finished. We're all looking forward to yummy cherry cobblers and just eating the cherries from the jar.