Cherry Bomb
or
How NOT to Make Cherry Liqueur
or
Sometimes Marriage is a Messy Business
A few people have asked me how I make my sour cherry liqueur. More people don’t care how I make it, as long as I make it. And share it. Recent occurrences remind me of something my Mom used to say, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
(This from a woman who said three Oreos is a serving.)
Right up top imma tell you somebody said not to put the cherries in the disposal.
Maybe you can guess what happened, but let me tell you how it went down.
It’s been a few weeks, enough time that we can look back and laugh. It is, after all, our sense of humor that has sustained us lo these many years.
I know it was a Monday night, the night the Pats were whuppin’ up on the Jets. Had the game been more intense, the incident might’ve been a whole lot more explosive.
My husband was ensconced in the living room watching the game and I was in the kitchen with the cherries.
Not my first rodeo. I know how good sour cherry liqueur is. I know how good the by-product of the process, pickled cherries, if you will, are. But pitting the cherries to preserve them is time and labor intensive. Also sticky. And with a “...three cherries for the jar....one cherry for my mouth…” approach, literally intoxicating. This year we had a bumper crop of by-product, because in one of those prolonged delusional moments I’m prone to (one that lasted most of July), I’d planned to bottle this year’s vintage for favors at our younger daughter’s wedding. Serious volume. I came to my senses, but not before hand-picking 37.8 pounds of cherries, immersing them in gallons of vodka and storing them in multiple jars on the kitchen counter.
That’s a lot of cherries.
As much as it pained me, I knew what had to be done. After draining the liqueur from the first vat, I dumped the by-product into the sink and started the disposal.
Y’all know I was capturing the process in pixels, which is how I know the exact minute that things went south. At 8:58 pm the last of the cherries from that container entered the disposal and started churning merrily as the cold water ran.
Just a screen shot for the time stamp, video doesn’t work…
Much like the last batch of cherries in the disposal.
When the disposal was turned off, the cherry flotsam and jetsam circled the disposal...but did not drain.
“Hmm,” I said.
Thinking, hoping, dare I say - praying - the disposal was just momentarily jammed, I turned it on and off to reverse the blades. Several times. Water running all the while. I turned the disposal off and heard a dyspeptic gurgle from the bar sink on the other side of the room.
Let’s not panic, kids. I know...let’s try running the disposal in the bar sink!
Um. Now the main sink was gurgling. If it’s okay with you, I’ll just yada yada the parts about the plunger and the bubbly seepage from the Studor vent in the wall and get to the part where I say,
“Danny? I think we have a problem.”
And God bless the Jets. He didn’t miss much.
We tromped down to the basement to consider our plumbing options. I say “we”, but let’s be real, this is an episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and I’m Marlin Perkins standing off to the side while Jim wrestles the snake.
We moved some things out of the way and my hero climbed the ladder - armed with a pipe wrench, a bucket and the aforementioned snake.
I stood back.
Let’s take a moment to consider the situation. Two sinks overflowing with vodka-infused cherry remains and copious amounts of water, emptying into one drain pipe.
Did I mention that my husband does not care for cherries?
Contents under pressure. And not just my husband’s patience.
He loosened the clean out cover…liquid began to spew and then…KA-bam! The contents of the sink and half of the pipe exploded upward onto the basement ceiling before dropping heavily upon my beloved.
Time stopped.
There he stood, vodka-soaked cherry offal sliding from his head.
A deep and abiding respect for my beloved and our forty years together, as well as a healthy dose of self-preservation kept my baser instincts in check: I neither laughed nor ran to get my phone for the photo op.
He did catch a lot of cherry slop in the bucket, and more sloshed out as he snaked the drain. Sadly, the clog was out of reach. He chased it to a point just beyond where new plumbing meets old, and with mighty swiftness, he loosened the hose clamps and wrestled the business end of the pipe into a cooler to contain the surge. From there he was able to clear the clog (packed pieces of pits, one presumes) and get things moving again.
In my defense, I did not cavalierly toss cherries down the disposal. I read the Insinkerator manual and it was all yeah sure, toss that ish down there. I perhaps should have factored in new pipes emptying into the 90 year old drain pipe. Live. Learn.
I thanked my hero profusely for his efforts and encouraged him to shower and watch the rest of the game while I set about cleaning up the aftermath. I spent a couple of hours scraping, wiping, rinsing and repeating until the basement was no longer the pits.
Back upstairs, I was shutting down the cherry operation for the night when my husband wandered into the kitchen after the game. I was bagging up cherries, some in trash bags, some in Ziplocs to save for my sister, who is happy to take them off my hands, with or without the pits. We were debriefing about the incident, when my husband looked at me quizzically and asked, “What are you eating?”
I had been absentmindedly snacking on cherries as we spoke, storing the pits squirrel-like in my cheek.
“You realize I can never kiss you again, right?”
I’m not worried. I’m a little more irresistible than that statement might suggest. In fact, just last week he let me borrow his super special leather backpack for a quick trip to the big city with my sister. When he realized I was packing it with the cherry-filled Ziploc bags he said, “If those bags leak, don’t come home.”
I’m happy to report that I made it home safely.