Preserving Cherries

I waffled on this one. I wanted to preserve cherries, Sweetpea got sick so I didn't want to anymore, then I came across some beautiful Okanagan cherries at the farmers' market and there was no turning back. Twenty pounds of cherries is a decent amount. Once you start pitting them it feels like a ridiculous amount.

This is the first time I've preserved cherries so I didn't want to can a lot of them just to discover that nobody will eat them. I put up seven pints of cherries in light syrup, two pints of cherries in brandy and five half-pints of cherry jam from Canning for a New Generation.

The rest of the cherries were dehydrated for snacking and baking. That came to one and a half quarts of dried cherries.

Unfortunately, three of cherry jams didn't seal. I'm not sure why. I haven't had bad seals with my Tattler lids for a few batched now. I can't figure out what went wrong. But, it is very frustrating to have three half-pints of hard work sitting in the fridge instead of the pantry downstairs. What do you do with jams that don't seal?

Because I already have a few jars of jam in the fridge I opted to make jam thumbprint cookies from The America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book. That used up one jar of jam. I may just freeze the other two jars for now.