You can use sweet cherries for this as long as you reduce the sugar. Unless you like your soup tasting like candy.

Oh, and don’t even think about using canned cherries. Nope. Won’t work.

Plane

Boil one box of rotini til al dente. Drain and put in medium sized bowl and stir with olive oil.

Into a small bowl, put:
Half a red onion, diced finely and splash with balsamic vinegar.
A few tomatoes into bigger dice
Basil cut into shreds
Feta cheese crumbled.

Stir tomato mixture and add to rotini.

For fruit, when your farmer’s market fruit is gone or too ripe, it’s really useful to have some good frozen fruit on hand. Fruit for freezing is usually naturally ripened before freezing and so quite good. Freezing does tend to destroy the texture a bit, but if you use the fruit for cooking or blending (smoothies anyone?) it works quite well. Raspberries and peaches are great. When I can find sour cherries (which isn’t often) I love to make a big pot of cold, sour cherry soup. It’s a Hungarian specialty I found on a internets years and years and years ago.

1.5 quarts Water
3 tbls. flour
1 cup sour cream
dash salt
1 pound fresh or frozen pitted sour cherries
3/4 sugar
In a pot add water, cherries and sugar. Cook until soft. In a separate bowl mix sour cream, flour and salt until smooth. Mix in 1 cup of hot sour cherry mixture to sour cream and stir well. Add this back into whole pot of cherries and water, stir thoroughly, then chill. Serve very cold. It’s wonderfully pink, sweet and delicious on a hot summer day. To use sweet cream instead of sour cream, add a cinnamon stick to the cooking cherries and discard the stick to serve.

Also, for the meat eaters out there, get the cheap cuts like chuck roast, rounds, etc.. and cook them low and slow in liquid (it’s called braising). You can do this a million different ways with flavors ranging across the globe from Morocco to Korea, Brazil to Brooklyn. If a stew seems like a really heavy thing to have on a hot day, the best idea is to cook it one night after you get home from work, stick it in the fridge, and then gently warm it up the next night (when the flavors are even better) and eat it with french bread rounds brushed with olive oil and toasted in the oven. As long as the stew is not too hot and is barely above room temperature, it goes wonderfully on a hot summer evening. My favorite is a French-inspired version cooked with olives and orange zest, re-heated and served with a glass of a dry rose, and sour cherry soup for afters. A meal fit for any gourmand made from the cheapest cuts of meat, a modest wine and frozen cherries. Great for summer entertaining on a budget.

Plane
Getting really hungry