Amsterdam Foodie

Cherries are rather special as fruit goes because they crop up in so many different places: ‘popping one’s cherry’, ‘with a cherry on top’, ‘cherry picking’, ‘[loving you is] cherry pie’, and  – surely the best known? – ‘feelings take up shelter in the base of my spine, sweet like a chica cherry cola’. N’est-ce pas? (That was a band called Savage Garden in the mid-nineties, in case you’re too young/old/cool to know the lyric.)

But then there’s that little game we used to play counting our cherry stones after dinner: ‘tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief’. I’d always eat enough cherries so I came out on ‘rich man’. It didn’t work. And, interestingly, there wasn’t an option for ‘no man’.

I’m possibly starting to sound like a bit of a loony now, so I’ll get on with July’s seasonal recipes…

Cherry cosmo

So, I finally discovered another use for those little squasher things you get with lemon in your white beer! Take a cocktail shaker, squish about 10 cherries in the bottom of it to get all the juice out, add a shot of cherry vodka, a shot of regular vodka, a shot of coitreau and the juice of half a lime. Et voila, the chica cherry cosmo!

Pork fillet with cherry sauce

Then last night I halved another dozen cherries, took the stones out and turned them into a sauce for pork fillet along with a bit more cherry vodka (to add sweetness), some calvados, mustard, garlic and cream. I’d actually intended to make it with duck, but the shop I went to after work didn’t have any and there was no time to go on a wild duck chase. There was rather an important football match to be watched, don’t you know?!