It is high season for soft fruit at the markets. At The Hospital for Sick Children on Tuesday morning I see apricots, red, black, and golden raspberries, strawberries, red, white, and black currants, gooseberries, and both sweet and sour cherries.
With environmentalists predicting that global warming will cause the extinction of sour cherries I’m cooking up as many as I can while they are still around. In the three quarts I have pitted this week, there was only a single cherry that was unusable. The result: two pies. The first was cherry, black raspberry, and apricot. The apricots looked perfect but turned out to be under ripe - though they cooked up nicely. The second pie was a classic lattice-top cherry.
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Beets and Carrots
I also found more of my new favourite beet, the rodina, at Sick Kids. These were larger than the first ones I tried, but just as good.
The Collins from Puslinch (Borden, Sick Kids & Weston markets) have one of the best selection of carrots around. The very best of a great lot are their parisiennes. Unlike the long tapered roots we are used to, these are short and chubby, rather like an orange beet. Though they do not resemble the carrots of my childhood, they do have all the earthy sweetness that is the carrot of my memory.
