Save Your Cherry Pits!

I enjoy taking a purposefully minimalist Mark recipe and using it as a template to make something complicated, just for the sheer fun of it — and because I can. The process usually starts with a trip to Chino Farms or Specialty Produce to see what looks the most beautiful, taking it home, smoking a bit of a sativa, flipping through How to Cook Everything (I’m partial to the 20th anniversary edition), and daydreaming about how I want to prepare my haul. Lately, that haul has consisted of any and every variety of cherry I can find: rainier, black, bing, skylar rae, sweet memories. I actually squealed when I saw that “strawberry cherries” are a thing. I love getting a bit of each kind and tasting them side-by-side to get a better understanding of the flavor differences —you know, for science. But mostly as an excuse to eat lots of cherries.

On Pitting

There’s nothing more luxurious to me than being able to inhale fistfuls of cold cherries without being encumbered by the pits. So, if you enjoy cherries in any capacity, you should get a cherry pitter. It is well worth the investment. I’m not usually a fan of a single-function kitchen tool — the egg slicer, the avocado scooper, the banana keeper— but a cherry pitter pulls its weight in the kitchen. Also, it’s kinda fun? I’m a fan of zoning out and doing tedious kitchen activities (remember that “smoking a bit of sativa” bit I mentioned earlier?), so I find pitting cherries with a pitter to be deeply satisfying.