Cherries

Being a native Michigander, I’m legally required to love cherries. You’re given a pound of dried cherries when you get a Michigan driver’s license and every baby born in the mitten is outfitted with a cherry-shaped beanie. Just kidding, but we do grow a lot of cherries in the fruit belt—over 180 million pounds of tart cherries and about 62.5 million pounds of sweet cherries every year. Growing that many cherries means that you work them into many an unsuspecting recipe—cherry BBQ sauce, cherry salsa, cherry sausages—and it works, mostly.