She stuck in her thumb and pulled out a cherry!

It is cherry season again in Israel.  This is one of the things we like about it here – we always and only eat what is in season.  I think we’ve bought one bag of frozen veggies, and it is still in the freezer.  Otherwise, the market is full of the freshest produce when it is in season.
We really should have tracked the seasons so that we can tell people who are coming when to expect what (and when to be ready to not be able to find something).  Strawberry season, for example, is March/April and avocado season ends just before 5 de Mayo.  But anyway – now it is cherry season which means most of the fruit stands in the market have huge piles of cherries! 

There were wild fires on the way up there.

Last year I made my grandma Schuett’s cherry soup!  I don’t think I ever ate it when she made it, but I inherited her recipe and it was delicious!  I bought a kilo of fresh cherries (I don’t know how much that is in pounds…I’ve been out of the States for long enough to not know how much a pound of cherries or chicken is.  But I know how much 200 grams of cheese is and how much 1 kilo of cherries is.  They will take you about 45 minutes to an hour to pit with a hairpin – another cherry secret passed down from Grandma.).

This year I thought I’d take it a step further.  It wasn’t enough to make my own cherry pie from scratch, or pit my own fresh cherries…no…this year – I wanted to pick my own cherries!

My friend Claudia and I drove to the northern most Northern tip of Israel (we were literally only kilometers from Jordan and kilometers from Syria – no, I don’t know how far in miles).  There was a fruit orchard with tons of cherry trees and…ready for it…RASPBERRY BUSHES!  These were the only bushes I’ve seen in all of Israel…and there were fewer bushes for the whole country than there were in my backyard growing up.  Nonetheless, after crawling on my hands and knees for 30 minutes, I found 12 raspberries!  The 20 seconds that those little berries dripped down my fingers and melted in my mouth were magical!

Anyway – back to those cherries.  At first we were like kids in Willie Wanka’s factory, eating cherries off of every tree.  Then we started to get full, so we got pickier and only ate the darkest berries that were warmed with sunlight.  Then we would only eat one from a tree – unless that one tasted good, then we’d try another from that tree.  Eventually my stomach started to hurt, so we moved to the raspberries and eventually decided to fill my bucket with the cherries (instead of my mouth).

I think I succeeded in eating my fill!  And then, with the kilo of cherries I hand-picked myself, I made a delicious cherry pie!  Mmmm.

We always see Israelis jumping into flower beds or behind bushes to take pictures.  This is our ode to the Isreali cherry pickers.