Kids Dish

A quart of sour cherries showed up in my fruit share yesterday and I was a little bummed about it at first. When it comes to fresh, seasonal fruit, sour is not my taste sensation of choice. But life gave me cherries, so cherry crisp it is. What better way to get your kids to eat sour fruit than to bake it with a sweet, crumbly topping and serve it with whipped or ice cream? And it is mostly fruit.

Cherry Crisp
1 quart sour cherries, stemmed and pitted*
1/4 cup of flour
1/4 cup of honey

1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup old-fashioned oats
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter cut into small pieces
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

Preheat oven to 375
Combine cherries with honey and flour in a bowl and transfer to a glass pie pan.

Mix all other ingredients in a bowl until the mixture is the consistency of coarse crumbs. (If you have a food processor you can also pulse the ingredients together gently- you want lumps) Press this mixture on top of the cherries. Bake in the preheated oven about 45-50 minutes until the topping is golden brown. You can serve it plain, but whipped cream or ice cream makes it even better. My CSA newsletter also suggests topping with frozen maple yogurt- mix a couple of tablespoons maple syrup into plain yogurt and freeze while you make the crisp bakes.

This recipe also works with just about any fresh, seasonal fruit. Right now at my local pick-your-own they’re picking blueberries, raspberries, white and yellow peaches and apricots.

*In June when I got my first share of sweet cherries I wanted to pit them so Sam could eat them without me having to painstakingly pit each one by hand, or by mouth, if you want to know I really got the pits out. I read that you can pit cherries using a drinking straw. It didn’t work and I was too cheap to buy a cherry pitter. But with the smaller, softer, sour cherries a straw worked perfectly. Just push the straw through the stem end of the cherry and the pit pops right out.

eat local, cherry crisp, sour cherries, recipe