It is still stone fruit season in Thailand even though we don’t have a stone fruit season. I’ve frozen about 4 kilos of bing cherries and made a half-dozen small cherry tarts and frozen those, too.
Left: Cherry tarts, fresh from the oven.
Along the way, my cherry pitter broke. Over the past decade, I’ve gone through three or four pitters and can’t figure out what it takes to find a really good quality one.
I’ve had some metal ones where the rod that pokes out the pit has broken due to metal fatique. My most recent one was plastic and one of the two finger rests (it looks a bit like a syringe) snapped off. I have my fingers crossed that the model from OXO Good Grips will last longer. It isn’t like I have a lot of cherries to pit so I shouldn’t have to buy a new one every other year!
Left: the OXO model that I’m hoping will work better. Right: If I’m really serious about pitting cherries, I should go for this $56 model that can pit 30+ pounds of cherries an hour!
Plums are also on sale at the market. I bought a pack of six white-fleshed plums and made a claufoutis with it using the recipe from Julia’s Childs’ “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”. Most recipes I’ve made have some melted butter in them, but not this one. The resulting custard is quite dense and rich. Tasty, of course, but it would benefit from a little lightness.
Right: Stepping in from the balcony (our outdoor kitchen) with a fresh plum claufoutis.
Tawn returned home from Beijing with some peaches, so I’ll have to make a peach cobbler or peach crisp within the next few days. The peaches look really good but I think they’re not actually ripe. Genetic modifications and cross-breeding these days allow fruits and vegetables to look so amazing, even if they don’t taste that way.
Anyone want to stop by for dessert?
christao408 
Seems like you’re a serious cherry pitter and baker. Given how many pitting tools you’ve gone through which have broken, it might just be worth it to bite the bullet and buy the high capacity one. Even if YOU may not need 30 pounds of cherries done per hour on a regular basis, it probably will never break on you if you are using it occasionally. Just my 2 cents.
The cherry tarts look great and make me feel hungry.
DC- That’s a very good point and I may well end up doing that. Maybe I’ll start with the OXO one first since cherries really are a limited time (and expensive) phenomenon here.