Yes, it's another post about cherries. But, honestly, what did you expect? Cherries are everywhere at the moment.

About this time every year, a little Depression Era song makes its return to the food blogoshpere: "Life is Like A Bowl of Cherries." One can bet that this song title will be borrowed for somebody's cheerful blog post about the fruit almost as assuredly as on can count on those swallows invading the poor, decrepit Mission San Juan Capistrano.

And, much like those damned birds, this song (words by Lew Brown and Buddy De Sylva, music by Ray Henderson*) is as chirpy as they come.

Not that that's necessarily such a bad thing. I mean, who couldn't use the occasional reminder to shrug one's shoulders and enjoy life?

Just have a look-see at the lyrics to see what I mean:

Life is just a bowl of cherries

Don't take it serious

Life's too mysterious

You work, you save, you worry so,

But you can't take your dough

When you go, go, go.

So keep repeating, "It's the berries."

The strongest oak must fall.

The sweet things in life to you were just loaned,

So how can you lose what you never owned?

Life is just a bowl of cherries,

So live and laugh at it all.

Why is it that Depression Era songs cling to me (please excuse the stone fruit metaphor) like fuzz on a peach? It's probably my chronic broke-ness. And the fact that I have a penchant for music that was born about the same time as my parents. Whatever the reason, this song is stuck in my head.

I am taking this as some sort of sign. Therefore, I am also taking its message to heart.

No longer will I over-complicate my feelings toward cherries. I will do my best not to think of them as symbols of transitory beauty, who in desperate need to retain their youth, turn to alcohol for support. Instead, I will eat them and enjoy them as they come. And when I dip into a brandied one or two come winter time, I will no longer view them as Helen Lawsons-in-a-jar.

Nor will I focus on the seedier side of the cherry pit-- that hard, bitter thing that can crack a tooth or choke a baby. I will not think of them as cyanide-laced stones that, if eaten in large quantities, offer up confusion, anxiety, vomiting, and death. Nope. I will dream of cherry pit ice cream instead.

From now on-- or, at least until cherry season is over-- I am going to focus on the now, the keep-it-simple, life-does-not-suck message of this glorious little song.

And I will live and laugh at it all.

Fresh Cherries with Ice and Mint

Why ice and mint? Why not ice and mint? This is how we serve them where I work. The ice gives the natural tartness a fighting chance against the sweet, much in the way that serving a big red California Cabernet Sauvignon at cellar temperature allows the inherent acidity of the grapes to balance out hugeness of the fruit (and masks the high alcohol). The mint is crushed and torn and shredded over the ice and cherries so that, as the ice melts, the mint's essential oils gently wash over the fruit, giving the cherries a subtle little extra somthing-something.

It is simple genius, if you ask me.

If you haven't tried it, you should. If you don't want to try it, what on earth is wrong with you?

Ingredients:

A bowl's-worth of cherries. Bing, Brook, Ranier, etc. Whatever you prefer. Whatever is currently available.

A handful of crushed, fresh ice. Please do not use ice that has been sitting in your freezer for months. If you do, you'll be washing all sorts of interesting flavors over your cherries.

A few leaves of spearmint, cleaned.

Preparation:

1. Wash cherries, place in large bowl.

2. Add ice to cherries. Toss gently.

3. Tear mint leaves and sprinkle over cherries and ice.

4. Serve immediately and eat without a worry or care. Unless, of course, you crack a tooth or ingest an extreme amount of cherry pits. In that case, I advice you to contact your local dentist or poison control center, respectively.

*On an interesting note, these fellows (either in collaboration with each other with other artists) gave us a selection of more food-related songs like "You're the Cream in My Coffee," "Animal Crackers in My Soup," and "Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree.

The first cherry of the season is always the best. Although I know what a cherry tastes like, I'm still always a little pleasantly surprised when I first bite into one after months of going without. But I don't eat just any cherry. I want a cherry that is firm to the touch, the skin taut with its underlying juices, and deep deep red. Keep those mushy cherries away from me. I want no part of them.

In college, I once got through an especially yawn-inspiring section of Herodatus’ The Histories by treating myself to one sweet cherry for each page I read. I remember sitting on the worn plaid couch in my apartment with a big bowl of Bing’s next to me. I read as quickly as I could, anxiously looking forward to devouring my reward after consuming a page of boring Greek history. I remember nothing of the reading assignment, but will forever savor the memory of those enticingly ripe cherries.

Yet as much as I love simply eating a large bowl of cherries (sans Herodatus, please), I also love to cook with this versatile fruit, especially when I can get them fresh. Usually I make a pie or tart, but this year -- with drizzly and cold weather more like November than May -- I was in the mood for a hot cup of tea and some cake.

Following is my recipe for Cherry Almond Tea Cake. Made with a healthy portion of almond paste, butter and a smattering of buttermilk it has a rich nutty flavor that underscores the tart sweetness of those gorgeous sun-kissed cherries now available in markets everywhere.

Cherry Almond Tea Cake

Makes: One cake

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 pound almond paste (at room temperature)
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 sticks butter (at room temperature)
1 tsp vanilla
4 eggs (at room temperature)
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 1/2 cup pitted cherries cut in half

Preparation:
1. Preheat oven to 350 (or 325 if using a convection oven). You should also butter a 10-inch tart pan or baking dish for later use now.

2. Mix together the flour, baking powder, and salt.

3. Crumble almond paste into small pieces and place in a separate mixing bowl (use your stand mixer bowl, if you have one) along with the sugar and combine. Then cream the butter into the almond paste and sugar mixture for 2-3 minutes with your mixer on medium high.

4. Add your eggs, one at a time, to your almond paste/butter mixture and cream until smooth.

5. Add in your vanilla and buttermilk until everything is fully incorporated.

6. Gently fold in your flour mixture in batches, being sure not to over mix. When adding the last batch of flour, also add in the cherries and fold everything together.

7. Pour the batter into your prepared baking dish, using a spatula to gently flatten the top and then bake for 1 hour in a regular oven or 40-45 minutes in a convection oven.

8. When you can cleanly pull a toothpick from the cake, remove it from the oven and let cool. Top servings with powdered sugar.

Note: Almond paste is made of ground almonds and sugar. It's available in most high-end grocery stores and bake shops. It should not be confused with marzipan, however, which usually contains more sugar and so could throw off the recipe a bit.

Well happy Pride weekend and all that.

Frankly, I had conveniently managed to forget about it until my friend Sean mentioned that Cloris Leachman was to be Grand Marshall in this weekend's big parade.

I've never much cared for Pride Weekend. It's not that I don't enjoy being gay, because I do. I can reference old movies with abandon, not worry about child support payments, and get away with saying things that most straights would never dare to.

And, of course, I am proud of the fact that I know who Cloris Leachman is. I think every homosexual is required by law to quote freely and liberally from The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

I love being gay. I just don't love big parades-- they make me wonder how I'm supposed to get across town. It's kind of like how I feel about Christmas. I love the spirit of the thing, but I hate the clothes, the crowds, and the decorative motifs.

So no pink today, no Sarah-Tucker-there's-a-rainbow-on-your-table.

But there is fruit.

That's the best tie-in I can think of for clafoutis.

Clafoutis

Many of you know this dessert already-- it is, at heart, baked pancake batter dotted with fruit. There are recipes for apricot clafoutis (delicious), clementine clafoutis (if you don't know how I feel about clementines, please visit here), and eggplant clafoutis (?). If you can stick it into pancake batter, it's probably been made into a clafoutis.

A traditional clafoutis, however, is to be made with cherries. Amen.

Some folks run with the pancake theme, serving them warm and puffy and fresh from the oven for breakfast like one would a Dutch Apple Pancake. Do what you will, but the flavors blend together and texture becomes more custard-like if you have the patience to allow it to spend the night in your refrigerator.

The clafoutis is sort of like a Pride weekend trick-- if light and fluffy, fresh and hot is your thing, go for it. Out of your life and on to the next dessert, as it were. I just happen to prefer my clafoutis after it has hung around my kitchen for a little bit and settled down.

And I'm kind of proud of that.

Cherry-Almond Clafoutis

Serves: 4 to 8-ish, depending upon how you slice it.

This charming, no-fuss little number hails from the Limousin region of France, located not quite in the heart of the country, but more or less where the liver might be located.

Traditional clafoutis calls for leaving the pits in the cherries, the wisdom being that the pits lend a pleasant almond-like flavor to the dish. Of course, there are so few people left living in the Limousin region and those who remain are mostly elderly, that chipping a tooth is not considered much of a risk.

Ingredients:

1 pound of cherries (or enough to populate the surface of an 8-inch pan without touching each other), pitted or not pitted. The choice and the risk is yours.

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

2 large eggs

3/4 cups heavy cream (you can get away with using milk, but the day-after texture will suffer greatly, I promise).

6 tablespoons sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon almond extract

1/3 to 1/2 cup toasted slivered almonds

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

Powdered sugar, for dusting

Preparation:

1. Preheat oven to 350° F

2. In a blender, combine eggs, flour, cream, salt, and 2 tablespoons of sugar. Blend well, scraping down the sides of the blender from time to time. Or whisk aggressively. Your choice. When blended, add half the slivered almonds to the batter and stir them about.

3. In an 8-inch cast iron skillet or heat-proof baking pan, add butter and 2 tablespoons sugar until all is melted, slightly nutty-smelling, and syrupy. Add cherries; cooking and coating them for about two minutes.

4. Pour the batter gently into the pan around the cherries. Sprinkle the remaining sugar over the and pop into the center of your oven.

5. Bake for about 45 minutes, or until sufficiently browned and puffy, remove from the oven and let cool.

6. If your clafoutis is not sufficiently browned and puffy, do as I both say and do-- sprinkle the remaining almonds over the top and pop it under the broiler. Works like a charm unless you burn it.

7. Dust with powdered sugar for garnish just before serving with crème fraîche, lightly whipped cream, or all by itself.

It's an exciting time around the farmers market these days. I hadn't been to the market for about two weeks, and was amazed at how much the market changed in a short amount of time. There is a promise of summer fruit in the air, and the spring vegetables are in abundance. Here are some of the things I am looking forward to this month:

CHERRIES

Cherries are making their way to the market, and should be available for approximately a month. We usually see the Brooks variety cherry first which is a crisp, tart cherry. That will be followed by Bing cherries, Rainier and sour cherries among other varieties. I am partial to Bing cherries from Lagier Ranch -- Mr. Lagier brings them to the market when they're perfectly ripe and delicious. This year, I will be keeping an eye out for sour cherries, as they make for a delicious brandied fruit which can then be used throughout the year for cocktails and desserts.

POTATOES

A while back, I told you about new potatoes -- the beginning of the season potatoes that are spectacular in flavor and freshness. I'm happy to report that they are back and I spotted them at the Berkeley Farmers Market last week at the Full Belly Farm booth. They are expected at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in the next month or so.

PEAS

Denise told you about making a pea soup this week, and I am looking forward to trying out that recipe. The fact of the matter is that my peas rarely make it past the shelling stage as I usually eat them raw or slightly steamed. But if you have the willpower, now is an excellent time to shell and freeze peas. My favorite place to purchase them is the Swanton Berry Farm booth that is in many local farmers markets.

STRAWBERRIES

Northern California is very lucky: our strawberries have an extremely long fruit season, and we will have them around for a while. Still, this is the perfect time to buy strawberries and freeze them if you can. If you have room, I suggest hulling the berries and freezing on a large cookie tray before storing in a freezer bag. I buy mine from Lucero Farm and from Yerena Farm.

ALMOND BUTTER

This is not really a seasonal product, but I just wanted to give a shout-out for Greg Massa's excellent Almond Butter. You may know Massa Organics farm for selling really delicious brown rice at many Bay Area markets. If you check his booth carefully, you will notice an almond butter that he has been producing for a few months. I am addicted to this almond butter, and highly recommend trying it. It's pricey, but if you eat almond butter as slowly as I do, you'll only be making the investment every few months.

What are you looking forward to at the market this month?

In late spring when the first cherries would appear at the Dallas farmers' market, my mom would sing her little cherry ditty: "Cherries are ripe..." Granted, it doesn't sound like much—it's only a 3-word phrase—and she did sing it much more often than as an annual welcome to the little stone fruit, but I can't look at cherries anymore without hearing her singsong voice.

Cherries are finally making an appearance at Bay Area farmers' markets, and starting to taste less like watery insipid blobs and more like juicy flavorful sweet little gems.

While I typically like to eat my cherries out of hand, I will eat any fruit baked, especially if it's surrounded by pastry, custard, or cake. So what happens when you merge all three and throw in some cherries? You get a heavenly, crispy-on-the-outside, custardy on the inside, pancakey Cherry Oven Pancake.

Modeled after the German apple oven pancake (also known as a Dutch baby), this incredibly easy, impressive dessert is as much science experiment as it is full-on delicious. Into the oven goes a thin batter, and out comes a big puffy surprise. Make sure you call your kids, your guests, or at least your dog in to see it as you pull it from the oven so they will be in awe of your culinary prowess.

Cherry Oven Pancake

Serves: 4-6

Ingredients:
3 eggs
1 cup whole milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 cup flour
2 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
2 cups cherries, pitted
1/4 cup sliced almonds (optional)
Powdered sugar, maple syrup, or lemon wedges for serving

Preparation:
1. Preheat the oven to 450F. Puree the eggs, milk, vanilla, salt, and sugar in a blender until smooth. Add the flour, and puree again until smooth.

2. Over medium heat, melt the butter in a 10-inch cast iron pan and warm just until it starts to brown, then add the dark brown sugar, and stir with a wooden spoon until it starts to melt. Add the cherries and sauté until they start to release their juices, about 1 minute.

3. Turn off the heat and pour the batter into the pan. If you are using the almonds, sprinkle them evenly over the top of the batter. Quickly place the pan in the oven. Reduce the heat to 425F and bake until puffed and golden, about 20 minutes.

4. Sprinkle with powdered sugar or serve with maple syrup or a squeeze of lemon.

People have been ranting and raving ad nauseum about how great stone fruit season is shaping up this year, beginning with cherries. Far too many exclamation marks have been typed, causing an unfortunate cramp in the left hand in the most rabid of us, blogging their praises. I prefer to save my left hand for other, more important activities...

If your mind has made its way back from the gutter now, that's wonderful. Thanks, but I was referring to activities like practicing good penmanship and chopping down cherry trees.

I'm afraid I was not among those singing gospel-strength love songs to the cherry this season. In fact, I think I've actually shrugged my shoulders and rolled my eyes with an "Oh really?" dropping from my lips in response to their purported greatness. It's not because I'm a cherry hater. Quite the contrary.

I am merely a jealous lover. If everyone gorged themselves on cherries this season, would there be enough left over for me? An act of self preservation, plain and simple.

How fascinating that I should mention preservation and simple in the same sentence, since they are the essence of my post today.

In May and June, if one looked in my refrigerator, one would find among the cheeses, mustard, beer and long-forgotten yogurts, a bag of cherries. Sometimes two because I'd forget that I had purchased a bagful the previous day.

The cherries are for eating out of hand, mostly. If I'm feeling ambitious, I'll pit and stew some with sugar, water and a little vanilla extract for pouring over my ice cream. Or make clafoutis, a dish my friend Karen refers to as a "no-brainer." Indeed it is and, therefore, the perfect dessert for me.

By the end of June, I am sick of cherries. Or sick from them. I am, by then, ready for some summer loving. My attention wanders. A bit of peach fuzz catches my eye and my taste for cherries sours.

Until next year when the fever hits me again, sometime around April.

This year, I celebrated Easter with some old friends from cooking school. Doralice, our organizer and chiefest food pimp, brought with her a jar of her vodka cherries. I thought to myself, "That's just about the smartest thing I've ever heard of: fruit and alcohol." I made a mental note to do the same this year. I'm glad I didn't forget.

If you are anything like me and have no patience whatsoever for jam-making, preserving fruit in alcohol is just the ticket-- or tonic. I may be tired of them now, but come winter, I'll be glad I have them to remind me of warmer days. In fact, they will inspire much warmer nights since I will use them to garnish Manhattans, my cold weather cocktail of choice.

Here's the recipe. I hope it doesn't prove too difficult.

Brandied Cherries:

Two important things you will need for this recipe:

1. a 4 quart glass or ceramic container
2. a lot of patience

Ingredients:

1 cup simple syrup
6 cups dark sweet fresh cherries (most would suggest pitting, I disagree for aesthetic reasons)
2 cups vodka
2 cups brandy

Preparation:

Place cherries, simple syrup, brandy and vodka in container. Cap tightly or cover snugly with plastic wrap. Store in a cool dark place for three weeks. If you tell me there is no such place in your home you are kidding no one but yourself. Swirl the mixture around in the container every three days.

After three weeks, I imagine (I say imagine since I've never done this before) I will taste the liquid (my container comes with a very convenient spigot at the bottom) and adjust the sweetness should I choose to do so with more simple syrup, or maybe add a vanilla bean or some whole allspice or whatever strikes me as a good idea at the time.

Then I'll let them sit some more. That is, until it turns cold and I start craving a Manhattan.