Cherries, Eddie Clendening, and Gil Elvgren

This will be sort of a stream-of-consciousness post. Bear with me.

Cherries. The cherries are delicious this season, and they were on sale, so I bought a lot. And now I’m wondering what to do with them all! I’ve heard they freeze very well, and goodness, that would be a wonderful addition to all those smoothies I don’t make. But you know how I love to cook, and so I asked on the Tiddleywink Vintage Facebook page: what would you do with approximately 3 pounds of cherries? The most common reply thus far has been “pie,” which is fine and tasty but what kind of cherry pie? You do realize, of course, that I have cookbooks dedicated solely to pie recipes, and believe me, they have pages of recipes for cherry pies. One suggestion was to dry them, which certainly will keep them viable for far longer than my refrigerator, but I’m not a snack-on-dried-fruit person. I’d need to do something with them again, maybe a dried cherry sauce or reworking the dried-cherry-pie recipe that I did last winter and wasn’t thrilled with. And apparently didn’t post about, but you didn’t miss much. More suggestions included making a crisp, making sauce for pork (mmmm) and making them into liqueur for the winter holidays. These are all excellent suggestions, and I’m inspired. I think that what I may do is make a cherry pie with cream cheese crust, and with the rest: the tiniest batch of spiced cherries, put up for winter. Whatever I do, the recipes will follow later this week.

Related to above: someone posted a while back that she had just learned the trick of pitting cherries with a chopstick and a bottle, and I tucked that away in my brain matter. (I’ve tried the paperclip method, and it’s crap. I didn’t make a cherry pie for years after that, because the experience of pitting cherries that way had been so awful.) I’ve eyeballed a few different cherry pitter gadgets, but never felt that the expense of money and storage space was really worth it. But empty bottles and chopsticks? Those, I have on hand. And it works! Far easier than digging around with a difficult-to-grip paperclip, that’s for sure. It’s messy, and cherry juice will spray well beyond the boundaries of your apron (my readers wear an apron, of course, when tending to kitchen tasks). Wear black, and keep a sponge handy for cleanup. My ratio of pitting-to-eating was perhaps 20 to 1, of which I’m fairly proud. Anyway, now they’re ready to go, no matter what I decide to do with them.

Local-boy-done-good Eddie Clendening is back in town for a brief visit, and he and the Blue Ribbon Boys, as well as The Lucky Few and Bongo and the Pygmies, put on a slam-dunk swell 7-hour show down at Gary Lee’s. DJ Dogboy filled in the gaps, and fun was had by all. Eddie asked Woody up to the stage for a song, and I do ever so love Woody’s singing voice. I told Dina that if I’d known, I’d have brought a spare pair of panties with me to toss onto the stage!

I picked up a few things for Tiddleywink Vintage and Winkorama Vintage Sewing at some estate sales on Saturday. Not the trunkloads that I see other vendors showing off, but a few dresses, a pair of shoes, some cookbooks. It’s rare that I run into a motherlode of goodies, at prices that I can actually keep affordable for you guys. Anyway, each sale was filthier than the last, and I was so excited to get home and bathe that I didn’t get a chance to properly look through the stack of $10—Whole Box stuff until yesterday. 6 local newspapers from 1962, a 1958 LIFE magazine, a 1963 LOOK magazine, two 1959 issues of the National Police Gazette, and my favorite so far, a 1948 issue of Woman’s Home Companion. I plan to go back and read the articles, but, well, I could spend the rest of my life just scanning in all of the wonderful ads to share with you, from this and so many other vintage magazines in my collection. For now, let’s leave with a sweet Gil Elvgren painting which accompanies a bit of fiction titled A Lover and His Lass.

Now, time for lunch, then to pack this weekend’s orders for shipping, and to get some new listings up for you! Happy Monday!