Apricots and Vodka

Who wants apricots? 

My dad called last week with an offer to lift me up in the tractor bucket if I wanted to try to strip the upper branches of their prolific tree. Of course, I can’t pass up the opportunity for free fruit. Within an hour or so, my 13-year-old son and I were sitting—uncomfortably—in the bucket of my dad’s small tractor in the 95-degree heat, trying to reach golden fruit that was just out of reach. Even the bucket of the small Kubota wouldn’t reach the loaded uppermost branches.

This is what a tractor bucket full of apricots looks like.

Still, it didn’t take long to fill six small boxes. The next question—what to do with them? While I expected to share the apricots, it turned out my parents didn’t want any of them.

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I really have been looking into traditional winemaking. While it seemed the perfect solution to some of that fruit, I’m nowhere near ready to dive in—no knowledge, no equipment. I posed the question of apricot wine to my husband, perhaps looking for tacit permission to dive into supply purchasing. He responded that he would prefer apricot brandy.

Well, I don’t know how to make brandy, either. I bet it’s more difficult than wine.

Still, I took to my ever handy Google and managed to pull up some ideas. It turns out, you can make a pretty good apricot brandy simply by soaking apricots in, well, brandy. Or sometimes vodka. I confess, I don’t understand why apricot brandy would call for vodka. Either way, though, it seemed simple enough.

It took me a couple of days to implement my plan. Saturday was taken up with a five-hour round trip to pick up my 12-year-old from ranch camp, and then by last-minute cooking for church fellowship on Sunday. I finally managed to get to a liquor store for some vodka and brandy. (Not being a regular in liquor stores, that felt like a whole adventure itself. Who knew there were so many kinds of vodka?)

I decided to experiment with several different recipes. The first one I tried was a generic Apricot Brandy Recipe from Food.com. With three ingredients--none of which was brandy--it seemed by far the simplest. It called for dried apricots but, rightly or wrongly, I figure fresh must be better, right? Okay, I get that the dried apricots must add to the depth and intensity, but the whole point of this is to use all my fresh apricots. Anyway, by Sunday afternoon, I had the mixture of apricots, sugar and vodka sitting on a dark shelf next to my homemade vinegar.

Apricot brandy attempt number one, ready for the shelf.

The rest had to wait, though.

Monday and Tuesday were swallowed whole by work at the newspaper. Then it was Wednesday. The rest of the family was asleep, including the rescue kitten nestled in my lap.

I’d already skipped out on an AWANA breakfast meeting, I had a board of commissioners meeting to Zoom and an antique airshow to attend with my family (and cover for the newspaper), and I was looking around my house with the paralysis of someone who has a ton to do and no energy to do it. And all…those…apricots.

Get out the dehydrator; it's time to tackle those apricots!