"cherries" news and stories

Each Thursday, we round up a selection of scrumptious links from our friends over at YumSugar. Here's what they've got cooking this week:

Spice things up the Tunisian way with a harissa made with garlic and chili paste.

Starbucks takes its first steps towards being healthier and greener with a new menu and more eco-friendly water faucets.

Impatience Inspected: How long will you wait for a table?

Cherries are in season in parts of the country, which means it's time for cherry-flavored salad, sauces, mojitos, margaritas, clafouti and ice cream sandwiches.

Shrimp and cocktail sauce gets a new twist with a mixture of avocado, corn and mango.

Seven teas to keep you ice-cold all summer long.

Be still, our sugar-loving hearts -- a butterscotch pudding recipe that takes less than 20 minutes to make.

What is this thing called kirsch? And what do you do when it pops up in a recipe?

Over the past few summers, cherry-based cocktails have become something of a signature for me, to the point whereupon being proposed to in mid-July a few years back, I immediately began pulping and freezing cherries for use in our wedding cocktails the following October. Fresh cherries have a cruelly short season, and I do my best to make the most of every phase from sour to Rainier to Bing. Each has a distinct level of sweetness and depth of flavor and is complemented by different suites of ingredients. Rich, dark Bings stand up to wood smoking and full-bodied lemon and limeades, but tender, young sour cherries seem a natural fit for a subtly refreshing sweet iced tea. Oh - and booze.

Recipe follows after the jump.

One of the things that says summer to me, more than hot weather, flip flops and the guys with coolers selling water bottles at stoplights and freeway exits is the ability to go fruit picking. I can't remember a single summer since I was 9 years old when I didn't find myself in a field of blueberry bushes, or carefully inserting myself further and further into a thorny blackberry bramble looking for the big, sweet berries.

The first few years I lived on the east coast, I planned a trip back to Portland that always happened to fall neatly during blueberry season (my mother's birthday coincides with ripe Pacific Northwest blueberries). Then last summer I headed to visit my parents in May and realized that if I didn't take matters into my own hands, I would miss out on picking. I started doing some research and found two farms that I absolutely love. This weekend, I'll be heading out to Mood's Farm Market near Mullica Hill, NJ to pick sweet cherries and early blueberries. I'm also planning a trip to Linvilla Orchards for raspberries in the very near future.

One of the things that helped me narrow down my u-pick choices was a guide that Metro Kids magazine (a Delaware Valley publication) put together last summer. They broke it down by state and so have a South Jersey guide, a Pennsylvania guide and a Delaware guide. When I'm in Portland, we always head out to Sauvie Island for all our u-pick needs.

I don't have much in the way of u-pick resources for the rest of the country, so I'm going to ask the rest of you to fill in the blanks. Where do you u-pick?

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Whether it's for iced coffee or a party, here are some fun things you can do with ice cubes.