It’s occasionally nice to have friends and relatives who are picky about food, because we end up with such things as all of the apricots we could pick. They’d started to fall from the tree, so we hurried over with a long stick & helped them along, giving us nearly 10 pounds of apricots (yes, I weighed them). Now, we could have eaten them … but that would probably result in all sorts of intestinal distress, as they were nearly all ripe, and the half which weren’t ripe when we picked them were ripe a day later. So, instead of gorging ourselves into illness, we dried them.
I don’t have any pictures of the little dried up halves, but I must say that they get really flat when you dry them cut-side down. The ones you get in the store have had the pits removed & have been dried whole, but I don’t own a pitter (I keep meaning to pick one up – for olives, mostly). So, it was a choice between ending up with them curling in upon themselves, and being wizened little nubs of apricot, or having very flat discs. Flatness won out, primarily because I think that we’ll be using these in fruitcakes, rather than just eating them. With fruitcake in mind, we dried them out until they were nearly crisp, so that they’ll keep over the summer without having to go into the deep-freeze.
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nice apricots! lucky you! what a great idea to dry them. they are so good dried. how about a bit of jam?
Ohhhh how ’bout Apricot Brandy? I have a recipe at my blog with fresh apricots but I have heard of people making it with dried as well. It takes 3 months with the recipe I use but it’s very good 🙂
Mmm – aprocot brandy sounds good….btw, I see that there is now a herd of buffalo in Fife, and they are making their own mozzarella…
India
We picked up a few organic apricots from the health food store down the road a few days ago and my 3 year old declared them better than chocolate! Congratulation on your windfall!
Wow! 10 lbs that a lot. Glad that you could make use of them. There’s a few more at the tip top of the tree if you can find a ladder and are brave enough to get a few more. Every know and then one of the ones way up high plop down and hit the fence.
Better you than me…:)
…and I seem to not be able to spell or write lately…could that be my diversion to apriocots???
APRICOTS!!!