Adventures In Squishing The Goo Out Of Things.

I bought a buttload of cherries at the local farmer’s market the other day. That’s as good a place as any to start.

Not a literal buttload, mind you. Just a large amount, probably more than I could eat up before they turned bad.

But hey, they were tax-free and only cost three bucks. I envisioned everything from banana splits to flavoring my Coke Zeros with them.

One small problem.

When I got them home and washed them off and sampled a couple, I found out they were pie cherries, not sweet cherries. They were too tart to use for things like banana splits. In fact, they were so sour I commented to my mother that they were not cherries at all, but rather they were tiny little plums.

So they sat in my refrigerator a few days while I put on my Pondering Pants to ponder what to do with them.

Finally today, I decided to run them through the juicer, and add a couple of teaspoons of Splenda and have cherry juice.

The juicer is a wondrous thing, if a little wasteful. I had discovered how wasteful while juicing three apples. I got a cupful of apple juice and a double-handful-sized wad of apple pulp and seeds separated out and tossed over into it’s throw-away bin. The juice was good, even with the carrot I let the Government Health Police guilt me into juicing and adding to it, but I thought that’s a lot of waste just for a cup of apple juice.

I picked out the seeds and ate the pulp, thinking that if I had some bread dough and it wasn’t so hot, I could bake some apple bread with it.

At least it threw the seeds in the bin instead of grinding them up and mixing them in the juice, I noted to myself.

But I digress.

It took all but a cupful or so of the cherries to make a cup of juice. I added the couple of spoonfuls of Splenda and took a sip. It was still too sour; it took probably half an hour to force down the stuff, and as I got toward the bottom it got gritty.

It was only when I opened up the throwaway bin that I found that the thing had decided not to throw the cherry pits away whole like it had the apple seeds, but rather to grind them up into something a little coarser than the sand that gets in your crack at the beach.

And any flavors that were in the pits went into the juice. That’s why it was so tart.

Bastard machine.

I hope cherry pits aren’t hallucinogenic or poisonous. The giant, floating Ray Romano head hovering over my house, pulsating to the sounds of Siouxsie and the Banshees, assured me they weren’t, so maybe I'm safe.