Orange-Cherry Butter with Port

This morning, I processed the cherry pits (which still had a good amount of cherry flesh attached to them). I put them into a pot and covered them with water, then churned them up with the potato masher while boiling them.

You can see the pits floating in mix.

I strained them, then put the seeds and pulp that didn't pass through the strainer back into the pot with a bit more water and boiled them again, then picked out the seeds and strained the pulp from the juice, first through a wire mesh strainer and then through a muslin bag.

Here's the juice I have now. It won't be as flavorful as the batch made from the pitted cherries, but it'll be useful for something!

I put the pulp into the small crock pot, then added 1 cup of orange pulp, 1 cup of port wine, and 1 cup of sugar. It is now happily cooking on low on its way to becoming orange-cherry-port butter!

ADDENDUM: after cooking for several hours in the crock pot, I put it into hot jars and processed it for 10 minutes. Here's a jar after it's done processing:

After this, I've still got a bit more than a quart of orange pulp left.

This orange pulp has made a lot of stuff!

I found a recipe for pear and orange marmalade -- I have a jar of pears soaking in port with rosemary, so I think I'll use them. More on that later.