Apricot Update, County Fair and Nectarines

Family vacation was all too short. We had a few days after returning from Crater Lake, which gave me time to check up on some of my experiments.

I will not share the recipe I used in my attempt to make apricot wine. Not yet, anyway. It definitely turned to vinegar by the time I was able to bottle it. It was a disappointment, but I do have uses for vinegar, and it sure looks pretty in those clear flip-top bottles.

Too much delay getting the wine into the carboy, plus too much air at the top of the carboy, meant too much exposure to air in the fermenting process. 

The apricot wine-turned-vinegar sure looks pretty in the bottle, though.

I don’t know if there were flaws in the recipe I used, but I suspect operator error—too much air and too little sugar. I’ll have the chance to try again though. Our nectarine tree is loaded with fruit that can’t be ignored much longer. I’ll keep you posted.

One of my apricot brandy experiments is still steeping away, though the eight-week process is nearing its end. The other two turned out rather well, though with a lot of apricot sediment that probably wouldn’t have occurred with dried apricots. I honestly don’t know which recipe I prefer, though I’m leaning toward the first, simple recipe. The sugar finally mixed with the vodka and apricots, and it ended up with a pleasant, liqueur-like consistency that was just what I was looking for.

In case you think I’m obsessed with alcohol, I did do other things with those apricots—roll upon roll of apricot leather, dried apricots…did I mention the freezer preserves?

Tray upon tray of apricot leather.

A couple of jars of apricot freezer preserves.

On another note, one of my recent Amazon purchases is my favorite thing right now. I used to dry herbs by hanging them on a hat rack, but I decided to let my husband’s hats have their space and got this herb-drying rack instead. I am happy both with how it works and with how it looks. It adds a certain charm to the kitchen hall in our Victorian home.

My new drying rack is mounted and in use.

Vacation was over all too soon, though. Hard on the heels of our brief time of relaxation came the county fair.

Last year, we were about to set off on a month-long, cross-country trek, so entering things in the county fair wasn’t high on our list of priorities. This year, I persuaded several of my family members to enter items (the lure of premium money helped) and gathered everything I could find to enter myself.

The fair hasn’t officially opened as I write this, so I don’t know all our results, but I did get this peek at one of my photos. Unexpectedly, a photo I took of those apricots received the Judge’s Choice ribbon. It’s an honor I’ve never received in my life before, and I’m kind of proud of it. Even though our fair is a small one, there’s a lot of competition from some amazing photos. Turns out those apricots were good for something I never imagined!

All those apricots!

Proud as can be of that ribbon!

After two days of 100+ heat, today is forecast to be gusty with a high of 91. We’re all sending up a prayer that no stray sparks start any fires in these ideal wildfire conditions. Meanwhile, the forecast of high winds means I need to get outside and pick the nectarines—ripe or not—off the overloaded branches of our tree before those branches break. In the seven years since we planted that tree, I’ve never seen an abundance like this. It’s a blessing, but also means more time up to my elbows in fruit.

Better get started.

 

Apricots and Brandy

You didn’t think we were done with apricots, did you? I still have a box and a half on my kitchen floor, so I’m still experimenting.

I already mentioned Apricot Brandy experiment number one: a pretty generic three-ingredient Apricot Brandy Recipe from Food.com. It called for mixing apricots, sugar and vodka and letting them sit in a dark space for about eight days. I’m four days in, and a little concerned that the sugar isn’t mixing well even with daily bottle-tipping.

After four days, there's still a layer of sugar at the bottom.

For my second experiment, I stayed with vodka but searched for something with more of a twist. I found it in Alton Brown’s Orca Apricot Brandy. This recipe was a similar concoction to the first, but this time with a kind of simple syrup using apricot jam as a base. It went on the shelf Wednesday afternoon. I’ll know if it worked in about a week.

Finally, I felt like I really wanted to make apricot brandy with actual…brandy. For some reason, maybe because I felt like I was stepping up my game using real brandy, I also wanted to use honey as a sweetener. After some searching, I found this recipe for Sandsedge Brandy from the Fantasy Inn blog.

It’s from a fascinating little blog I’d never heard of before, a recipe designed to pair with a scene from a book I’d never heard of, but I was instantly enchanted.

The blog reviews fantasy titles. Blogger Wol developed this recipe to pair with Fool’s Errand by Robin Hobb. I’m not endorsing the book; I’ve never read it. It might be great; it might be terrible. However, the whole idea of creating a drink for a book charmed me, so I decided to give it a try.

It was a pretty-straightforward recipe. I had just enough of my own home-grown honey to use in the simple syrup, and the jar looks amazing sitting on the cupboard shelf next to the other two. (I kind of want to dive in now, it’s so pretty.)

Apricots, brandy, honey, sugar and time--hopefully a recipe for success.

The downside is that I will need to wait four to eight weeks to find out if it worked. That’s an upside, too, though. Some things just get better with time.

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!