Cherry Recipes

We finished the last of our sweet cherries last week. I had lofty goals of putting more into recipes than what actually happened... but they were just too good by themselves and we really only had ~4# to begin with. I'll add some of those additional recipes that sounded good to me at the bottom of this post. I still want to organize all my recipes in some sort of side bar system. Anyone have any advice on how to do that? Next year, all my CSA and U-Pick posts will come in handy for my own reference too.

Cherry recipe #1: Cherry Cream Cheese Brownies.

This recipe uses a combination of dark chocolate and unsweetened baking chocolate. The cherries are pitted and halved and left to soak in Kirsch (a cherry liqueur) for at least an hour. Also in advance, pull the butter and cream cheese from the fridge so it reaches room temperature when you're ready to bake.
Some of the cherries are added to the brownie batter and some to the cream cheese mixture.

Brownie batter gets poured evenly into pan and then cream cheese put on in six large scoops.

Use a knife to swirl the cream cheese through the chocolate batter. (There seemed to be so much cream cheese that the swirl wasn't as pretty as I've seen/done before. Oh well.)

All done - yum! I served these to friends on Saturday of 4th of July weekend and then brought the rest to Craig's family picnic on Monday. I'll be honest - they weren't the best brownies I'd ever eaten. The cakey-ness (cakiness? - probably not a word) of the brownie was very smooth - you could tell I'd sifted all the dry ingredients - but the mouthfeel (that IS a word, despite Blogger's protest) was somewhat dry for some reason despite what seemed like plenty of moisture/butter in the recipe. Hmm... Anyway, definitely good but not the best.

I also wanted to come up with something other than dessert foods for our cherries so I just googled recipes for sweet cherries and came across this page on seasonalchef.com. (Seasonal Chef is a really neat website for cooking with local, seasonal ingredients.) This is what caught my eye...

Cherry Recipe #2: Cherry Mustard Chicken.

Wait! Don't stop reading yet! It's not as weird as it sounds! :) In fact, both kids ate it well and Craig even complimented that it was a great dinner and the sauce was really good. (He's actually been very complimentary lately.) I've always loved the combo of mustard and balsamic vinegar, especially over chicken, but I never would have thought to pair it with cherries! This recipe reduces white wine while it simmers as well and I topped it with green onions from our CSA.

Just a tip: I actually made this recipe as directed the night before serving and just put the chicken in a casserole dish, topped with the sauce and reheated at 350 for 25 minutes before serving. For the most part, every meal we eat in our house is something I prepped a day or so before - most often, the night before.

Other cherry recipes that I printed and will consider for the future:

1) that Sweet Cherry Pie from Smitten Kitchen (the only reason I didn't do it was because it called for 4 cups of cherries and that would have exhausted most of what we had for one dessert)

2) Cherry Coffee Cake from honeyandjam.com (June 4, 2009 post) - that's another cool food blog by the way

3) Sweet Cherry Cobbler from Epicurious.com... and another version from: waymorehomemaderecipes.blogspot.com