As a native of Germany, I grew up with red currants. The pearl-like, bright, tender red berries are still one of my favorite summer fruit. Too bad currants are so little grown in this country because they do really well in the East Coast climate. After moving them to a new location and a meager harvest last year, each of our three currant shrubs yielded several pounds this year. Most of them went right into the freezer for pies, cakes and other desserts but I kept some for eating raw.

Red currants are rather on the tart side so you need to add a bit of sugar. This is not really a recipe. One of my favorite and simplest ways of eating red currants is with Quark, the creamy cottage cheese without curds that can be found nowadays in supermarkets in the US. However, at $5 for 8 ounces, it’s prohibitively expensive. Luckily I found a great substitute lately: Greek yogurt. It is as close as you can get to the real thing and it’s even available from Stonyfield with vanilla flavor, which perfectly matches red currants (in Germany red currants are often eaten with vanilla custard). It’s an easy guess what I had for lunch these past two days…