Chokecherry Syrup Recipe

Taking a simple walk by a lake can be a 'heal-all' to what ails you

Putting all your eggs in one basket is a bad idea. It is also a bad idea to put all your eggs in one jacket pocket and then forget you have done so.

Finally recognizing that I would inevitably forget occasionally, I’ve learned to put the eggs in sandwich bags before I put them in my pocket. Then when I forget, the mess is easier to clean up.

It’s also a good idea to plant more than one kind of crop, and though I’m not much of a farmer, I have diversified.

It took me a bit longer to learn to diversify my wild crops.

Last year was terrible for huckleberries and not too bountiful for chokecherries. This year’s crop is sparse, too.

Without much optimism, we scouted the territory around Lindbergh Lake this week and found that insects had beaten us and the bears to the huckleberries.

That’s probably not as bad for the bears. I imagine they’ll be happy to eat berry-stuffed bugs. I don’t, however, have any “bugberry syrup” recipes.

As I strolled disconsolately back down to the lakeshore, a bright red berry caught my eye. It was a wild strawberry, in a state of ripe perfection.

I bent over to pick it and realized I was surrounded by ripe strawberries. A commercial strawberry patch couldn’t have provided a more bountiful crop.

Of course, they are only a 10th the size of commercial strawberries, but they are at least 10 times as good.

It was tempting to harvest every strawberry in sight, but a bad year for human berry pickers is even harder on feathered and furry berry pickers, so I left all but a handful.

There was a second crop in the same area, but I only “harvested” a photograph. Nodding onions were everywhere. So was death camas. Both are bulbs, and though the flowers are completely different, the leaves and the roots could be confusing, and they were growing side by side, so close that it was difficult to tell which leaves were coming from which plant. Death camas doesn’t smell like onion, but someone digging the onions after the flowers had died could make a fatal error.

A third crop was “heal-all,” a member of the mint family. There were hundreds of them — enough to stock a pharmacy.

As it happened, though, any healing that might have been necessary was being provided by the lake, with its sprinkling of loons, grebes, ducks, floating leafy twigs from a recently constructed beaver lodge, a deer on the shore that wagged its tail like a semaphore and a raptor soaring so high overhead it could be imagined to be anything from a hawk (unlikely) to a California condor (even less likely).

Chokecherry Syrup | Tasty Kitchen: A Happy Recipe Community!

Preparation Instructions

After picking your chokecherries, you’ll need to extract the juice. I use a steam juicer or you can use a jelly bag.

To make the syrup, start with 3 cups chokecherry juice in a medium sauce pan. (Don’t make the pan too small because it does boil up.) Whisk in 6 cups of sugar and stir over medium heat. When syrup comes to a full boil, boil for 1 full minute. Remove from heat and add 1/2 teaspoon pure almond extract.

Pour into 7 sterilized 1/2 pint jelly jars. Process in a canner for 10 minutes. (15 minutes for me, since I’m at altitude.)

This recipe does not serve 7. It makes 7 half-pint jelly jars. That serves a lot!

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