Cherries

Special offer! This week only. Order cherries from The Cherry before December 1, 2014 and receive a 15% discount when you include the code word FOOD42 with your order! See details below.

Cherries, I love them. And they’re in my local fruit shop now. The easiest way to enjoy them is simply served fresh in a bowl – a treat when friends drop around. I like to put together a fruit platter with cherries and other berries. On the Aussie Cherries Facebook page, I noticed cherry compote with cheesecake and very lush black forest cake with fresh cherries and cream. There were likes for the dark red cherries from the Young district of New South Wales and I have a friend from that area who simply loves the Ron’s Seedling variety.

My favourite cherry dessert is simple. Pit a punnet of cherries (see note below), then make a berry compote using a pack of frozen berries from your supermarket. (For my berry compote, I add a little raw sugar and a small slurp of white wine to the frozen berries and microwave them on HIGH for about a minute.) Serve the cherries and berry compote over vanilla ice-cream, or any other flavour you fancy (say, one vanilla scoop and one chocolate!).

Facebook page Aussie Cherries reminds us that cherries are fat, cholesterol and sodium-free and a great alternative to sugary snacks.

Exclusive Special Offer

For a scrumptious corporate Christmas gift, place an order of cherries from The Cherry – see their website – and it will be hand-delivered to your clients or friends. And you’ll receive a 15% discount when you include the code word FOOD42 with your order. But hurry, Christmas orders should be sent by December 1, 2014.   

Check out the website The Cherry for full details. The Cherry organises hand-deliveries of cherries to lucky recipients in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra and the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast. Now that’s a touch of luxury.

Pitting cherries

Christine from the Fresh team shows how to use a cherry pitter (find her on YouTube). She also demonstrated other pitting tips. I liked the one with an empty bottle and a chopstick. Remove the stem from the cherry. Hold the cherry over the top of the empty bottle, the bit where the stem was facing upwards, then push the chopstick through the cherry. The pit will land in the bottom of the bottle.

The glorious 100 days

In Australia, the cherry season begins in late October and continues through December to mid-January, though in Tasmania it continues until late February. So make the most of it.

Tasmania has Area Freedom status for Fruit Fly and exports cherries to Japan, South Korea and Taiwan (where import restrictions are stringent) to Asia more generally, to the Middle East and to Europe.

Storage tips

Simon Boughey of Cherry Growers Australia Inc. advises that the ideal storage temperature for cherries is 0-2 degrees. Keep cherries out of direct sunlight and put them in the fridge immediately you get them home. Cherries can absorb odours and bruise easily, so store them safely in an air-tight container in the fridge for up to three days.

Cherries can be kept frozen for up to six months. If you’re freezing a lot of cherries, place layers of baking paper between berries to stop them freezing as a solid block. Some supermarkets sell frozen pitted cherries, but I believe they are not local Australian cherries. The label should tell you.

Cherries and gout

Online sources say that eating cherries can help relieve the pain of gout. It seems that more studies need to be done, but research so far indicates that cherries reduce uric acid in the body and that can reduce the likelihood of an attack of pain in the joints due to gout. Dr Yuquing Zhang of the Boston University School of Medicine warns, however, that cherries alone do not prevent gout attacks and that sufferers should continue their present medications.

Helen Briton Wheeler is the author of Day of the Diamond Earrings and the forthcoming Finding Felicity.

Sandwich, anyone?

My grand-daughter Fern passed on this tip about peeling hard-boiled eggs: add a good shake of salt to the water while the eggs are boiling and they will be much easier to peel. She says it works. Fern is studying, and one of her favourite on-the-go lunches is a sandwich of boiled egg and canned tuna, mashed with a little mayonnaise, pepper and salt and spread between wholemeal bread.

Guess who's the Boss?

The head of our household is Pussycat (aka Tofu), whose favourite food is thin-sliced fillet steak – which she doesn’t get too often! Fortunately, she will accept sliced rump or topside, along with dried cat pellets. She also eats the pouched cat food she gets from me when she wakes me up from my precious sleep to give her breakfast at 5am.

Big Things on my Radar

 

Right now I’m glad I’m not looking for a job. When I joined the workforce (years ago), the Catch 22 for first-time job seekers was that every employer wants someone with work experience; but you can’t get work experience until you have a job.

The bad news is that this is still true! Only it seems, more so, with the unemployment figure for people aged 15 to 24, as high as 20% in some spots, notably west and north-west Tasmania, northern Adelaide and Cairns. I live in Sydney, and Parramatta is another youth unemployment hot spot.

Tony Nicholson of the Brotherhood of St Laurence describes youth unemployment as a disaster and warns that, in this situation, unemployed young people are at risk of never getting a foothold in the workforce and of being sentenced to a lifetime of poverty. He says that young first-time job seekers need advice; opportunities to gain basic skills; mentoring; and the chance to gain real work experience with a real employer.

Eamon Waterford of Youth Action (see their website) says that in Sydney’s Parramatta area lack of affordable transport and lack of affordable housing means that young people can’t get to where the jobs are. There is also a decline in blue collar jobs, he says.

If this is true, then our governments, state and federal, should step up. We already have too many people stressed out by high rents – not to mention the homeless! And good public transport is an infrastructure investment that will produce economic benefits long-term. Supporting blue collar jobs? Well that is another big need, one that has political implications, but should be on the agenda of all politicians committed to nationwide prosperity.  

The other job problem is youth underemployment and the casualisation of the workforce. I don’t blame employers, it’s the sign of our times that many small businesses are under pressure to survive. But it’s terrible for those workers who simply cannot get enough paid work hours.

So what is the answer here? Surely one answer is helping small and medium-sized businesses to thrive, to shed the burden of red tape and excessive regulation. If small and medium-sized businesses thrive they can employ more people, including young people.

There must be other solutions to the problems of youth unemployment and employment generally. I’m not a genius, so I’d be very glad to hear from anyone with good ideas.

Helen Briton Wheeler is the author of Day of the Diamond Earrings and the forthcoming Finding Felicity.