A Bowl of Cherries

I love summer because summer means fruit and fruit means breakfasts of fruit and yogurt.  I have lots of favorites, but one of the top fruit contenders has got to be fresh cherries.  Nothing beats the ripe red goodness of sweet firm cherries swimming in a sea of creaminess.  But, the logistics of cherry eating often kept me from partaking of them in the a.m.  I would sometimes plunk the cherries, whole, into my bowl of Greek nonfat, but then breakfast became a search and rescue mission of carefully gnawing my spoonfuls of yum in order to find all the pits before they chipped my teeth.  My other alternative would be to cut cut cut cut around each cherry about 38 times in order to slice the fruit away from the pits.  My fingers would be stained, the cutting board would be stained and it would take me an inordinate amount of time to cut up enough fruit to do the yogurt justice. 

“Haven’t you ever heard of a cherry pitter?” a relative finally asked me.

I heard angels singing in the clouds.  A what?  No, I had never heard of such a thing, but if it was any relation to the apple corer/slicer and/or the melon baller (both of which I bought and never used) then no thank you.

I was soon convinced of the superior benefits of a cherry pitter and vowed to get me one of those.  I shopped and purchased and stood, the other morning, poised over a big bowl of fresh, firm cherries.  Zing ping – the pit popped right out!  Zing ping – another did.  It was so fast and efficient.  Look, Honey, I called to my husband, look how fast and easy!  I was popping out pits faster than a machine.  Pretty soon, the whole bowl was full and I covered the pitted mound with yogurt dollops.

My smart relative was right!  A cherry pitter was fantastic.  I smugly gobbled down my breakfast thinking I was all that, now that I had a cherry pitter and knew how to use it.  I could be on an infomercial.  I could sell these things at the state fair. 

“What happened to your shirt?”  My husband asked when he came into the kitchen.  I looked down at what used to be my favorite white tee shirt now splattered with 10,000 tiny specks of red.  Pitiful.