Cherries!

Oh joy! Its cherry season! For a few shining weeks each summer, fresh luscious cherries are available in every grocery store, farm stand and fruit outlet. And even at Costco. Chomp on them after they've spent a night in the fridge and their cool, juicy, al dente goodness is one of summer's highlights.

Their color, ironically, isn't cherry red. Its actually a lovely blackened maroon which isn't really replicated elsewhere in nature. Yes, some plums come close (nice try) but they just won't ever be cherries now will they.

I can't make the connection between these gems and the fire engine red maraschinos of Shirley Temple fame. Surely they're not of the same genus or phylum. And let's not even talk about the canned stuff called cherry pie filling. That's not even food.

Here's a great recipe I've made for the past few summers. Don't let the title throw you off - its really good. It turns out better if you cook the cherries on the stovetop first and pre-bake the piecrust , both for about 10 minutes or so.

http://pie.allrecipes.com/az/HlthyndDlicisChrryPi.asp

Max 4, Rodents 0

For someone who appears so docile and mild-mannered, Max is at heart a cold-hearted killer. Since we've had him, he knocked off two mice last June and now has branched out to chipmunks. This June he's eliminated two of them, and is desperately working on adding to the notches on his lipstick case. Daylight hours are filled with his demanding meow to be let outside to hunt. As you know, his outside activities are monitored as we're afraid he'll become either coyote or fox fodder, so his macabre little hobby is pretty time consuming for us humans.

Max!

OK, I finally honored my New Year's resolution to learn how to transfer photos from our camera to the computer. In celebration of that, here's Max.

You might recall a previous post where I mentioned he murdered our older laptop by repetitive sleeping on the keyboard. Due to a confluence of a roll-back on the Walmart.com website and a benefit from work, we bought a new laptop for super cheap. It's very snazzy and makes all the photo transferring so easy its embarrassing. So, the upside is more pictures for all of you. : )