As I post this, I’m enjoying dinner from week twelve’s bounty; I am (ahem) a bit behind on my reporting duties. We’ll keep this one short and sweet – and not just because it’s featuring recipes from one week’s worth of CSA goodness. It’s also because week four brought with it… sweet cherries.

I think everyone has a different philosophy when it comes to cherries. Purists will eat the entire bowl in one sitting, spitting pits out into the sink until their stomach hurts. More creative folk will find ways to incorporate this sour-sweet ingredient into a dish in an unexpected way – think pork chops and cherry chutney. And last, but not least, there are the traditionalists who will take those pints of cherries and bake them into a cherry pie. 

While I enjoy cherries in-the-raw, my partner does not. In an effort to find a way for him to enjoy them too, I decided to transform them into dessert – yes, pie. BUT not your ordinary cherry pie… I revisited a recipe that I made a few years back: Cherry Lemonade Beach Pie. 

I distinctly remember reading only the recipe title when it first came out in August 2023 and knowing that I didn’t just want to make this recipe… I needed to make it. It felt like the quintessence of summer. 

At the time I made one tweak – instead of cherry-lemonade I opted for strawberry lemonade as that’s what I had on hand. But the effect was the same: sweet, sour, salty. 

The recipe calls for a ritz cracker or saltine crust (salty), a lemon curd filling (sour), and a layer of warm cherry jam on top (sweet). Which is how I found myself turning my two pints of cherries into homemade cherry jam. 

I’ve made jam a few times, but I’ve never felt confident in my jam-making abilities. In all recipes, reading the instructions closely and following them precisely will only get you so far – expertise comes with being able to navigate ambiguity and flex accordingly to get to the best result. For instance, while a recipe may recommend baking something for 25-30 minutes at 350 degrees, it usually will also include an alternative barometer that can help you assess if you’ve reached the desired end-result (e.g. “until golden brown”). This is the part that requires intuition and instinct which will only come with practice. 

The alternative barometer for jam is the Freezer Plate Test. In this test, you place a small ceramic dish in the freezer until it is extremely cold. When you think your jam has reached the desired consistency, you take the frozen dish out and place a drop of molten jam on top to have it cool and in the process (hopefully) set. After a minute or two, you then push the jam with your fingertip to see if it wrinkles. If it does, then your jam has reached jam-like consistency! If not, you need to keep cooking your jam. 

While cooking in general can be considered a science experiment, jam feels like it’s of the rocket-science variety. There’s a careful balance to be maintained between the three primary variables: sugar, acid, and pectin. Different fruits contain different amounts of each so the process varies in difficulty depending on which one you are trying to transform. Cherry is a low-pectin fruit, meaning you have to cook it for longer for the pectin to set appropriately. Many people will make their lives easier and add liquid or powdered pectin to expedite this process – I, on the other hand, was determined to use ingredients I had on-hand/forgot we actually have a ton of pectin deep in a closet from a previous jam-making endeavor. 

Long-cooking time aside, the jam jammed, we passed the freezer plate test, and I found myself with the perfect amount of jam to top our cherry lemonade beach pie. In the process, I walked away with a few handy tips: 

• Don’t use dairy-free sweetened condensed milk for the lemon filling – it is absolutely essential and not using it will result in a slightly curdled and not fully set interior (still edible, however). 
• A metal straw is a great alternative to a cherry pitter – a great hack for those of us who lack abundant kitchen storage. 

As my own worst critic, I was disappointed with my final result – it was imperfect. However, when enjoyed with friends and fireworks on a warm summer evening in July, it really did hit the spot. 

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Honorable Mentions

Here’s everything else I made from week four’s CSA bounty: 

• Chicken stir fry with CSA carrots and snap peas – easy, tasty weeknight meal
• Coconut braised collard greens with miso glazed cod and a side of last week’s red currant corn muffin – 10/10 this may be the best way to enjoy collard greens. Also I will never not be completely shocked when an enormous bunch of leaves shrinks down to the tiniest portion you ever did see upon cooking. 
• Burgers ft. CSA Boston lettuce aka butter lettuce aka bibb lettuce – can never go wrong! 
• Everything but the kitchen sink pasta: aka pesto, sausage, pea, zucchini pasta. It was good, but it did have a lot going on. Also my partner repeatedly complained that the act of shelling peas makes him feel like a medieval peasant – 6/10