Cheerful Churchmouse Cherry Crisp

One of Ellie’s favorite Christmas presents last year was…

“The Redwall Cookbook.”

She and Evie have both been into reading the Redwall Series ever since Daddy read them “Redwall” “Mossflower” and “Mattimeo” last year for bed time reading. She has now read thirteen of the 22 books in the series. (She wants everyone to know that “Mariel of Redwall” is her favorite so far).

She also loves the Redwall Cookbook, which is a story of four feasts (Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn) complete with recipes. She has been begging us to make a Redwall feast ever since Christmas. We did make Spiced Gatehouse Herb Bread a few months ago when she was feeling poorly.

We haven’t gotten up the energy to make a Redwall feast yet, but since our cherries are in, we did let her make a Cheerful Churchmouse Cherry Crisp (pg. 35). On Friday, Daddy told her that she could make it, if she came to the farm early when he did chores to pick the cherries.

She woke up at 5:00 on Saturday morning. Daddy told her it was too early, and she should go back to sleep while he finished morning prayers and went for a run.

She did not go to sleep. Instead, she went outside to check that Daddy had not left without her, and was still awake when he came back from his run.

So they had some tea and snacks and went to the farm.

As soon as we got there, she got right to work, while Daddy did the chores.

Edna and her two boys.

Eunice and Matilda. The sheep are settling in nicely and have gotten the morning rotation down. They are ready and waiting for fresh grass every morning.

Even with the help of the ladder, Ellie couldn’t reach all the cherries, and the robins found the tree in the last few days. They knocked down or ate basically every cherry in the top branches, so it was slim pickings.

But we grabbed every decent looking cherry that was left.

Next we stopped by the garden and continued training the cucumbers…

And the squash.

And goofed around a little bit.

And cut some Swiss chard.

And dug new taters.

Oh, and picked peas, strawberries and raspberries, and brought some cider up from the basement.

The smoked ham from our Meishan pigs had been thawing since Thursday, so it was ready to go for a farm fresh Lord’s Day feast.

After cleaning the house all day long (a universally popular activity that becomes more necessary the more children we collect) it was finally time to make dessert. The first step was pitting the cherries.

This is a cinch with Mommy’s new cherry pitter. (Not really new. We used it last year as well to can drunken cherries.

The next step was to follow the instructions carefully.

This is sometimes easier said than done. The recipe as written would only fill a very small pie plate, maybe 4-6 inches. We did not have enough cherries to cover the whole 9″ baking dish we chose, so we made extra topping crumble.

But it makes a good tail anyways.

And there you have it. One Cheerful Churchmouse (she introduced herself to our guests as “Cornflower”), and her crisp.

I was planning on taking a picture of the feast, but I forgot, and then we ate it.

Hello! This is Ellie! cornflower is the mouse in blue. She is the wife of the warrior mouse, Matthias, and the mom of Mattimeo who you will find in this book in Autumn. She is also really good at making honey baked apples. She is the beautifulest field mouse ever. If you look close in the picture she is blushing. Hee hee hee. Her husband stole a sword from a big adder named Asmodeus.