APRICOTS

[thansal]

Yes, Dried!

Then chop em up and put em on/in ice cream!

Or just make fresh apricot icecream (I don't know how that works, but my dad used to always make peach icecream).

My mum is a dried fruit nut, and I bought her some excellent ones off of woot.com for XMass this year, and they have mostly been icecream topping :P

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Stick 'em in a jar and pour scotch or vodka over them. Apricot liqueur.

I endorse this.

[RetailWorkhorse]

Stick 'em in a jar and pour scotch or vodka over them. Apricot liqueur.

I ALSO endorse this.

APOCOT BRANDY!

[kpzra]

Oh man, I WISH we had some up here...or any good, fresh fruit. I'd go for drying them, but I also have a food dehydrator so I use that a bit.

[Dave1982]

It really is amazing what a trim and proper nutrition can do to a fruit tree.

We've got an apple tree in our yard, and since there's an apple orchard in town the tree always gets fertilized. But whether or not we'd get decent apples was always hit or miss. Then a few years ago we had a professional come in to prune the tree (which was getting big and encroaching on the porch). Now, as long as we keep up on the spraying, we can always get lots of delicious apples.

[Food Lady]

When I was growing up we had some plum, apricot, and peach trees. There were so many fruits that the birds had a ball. Mom liked to eat them straight, so she didn't really make stuff, maybe occasionally apricot preserves. That's one of my favorite flavors. I suppose you could do all the usual peach recipes with apricots: cobbler (maybe with blackberries), tarts, broiled with a bit of brown sugar & cinnamon, in yogurt.

[Dilorenzo]

I'm not allowed to read food threads on here anymore. I started chewing through my necklace type thing when reading some of those.

[Shpepper]

if you decide to make the liqueurs, remember that you will need gallon jars and use a minimum of 1 pound of fruit to one pound of sugar to a fifth of alcohol. If you want more fruit for eating, add more. You will get better flavor adding the sugar to the mix. I've made this several times with cherries and it is wonderful. Let it age for a couple weeks, monitoring the fruit. The softer the fruit, the less time it takes. I left cherries in vodka for over a year. They were amazing, you won't want to do that with apricots though. A week or 2 should be sufficient.

[42_42_42]

You can use a food dehydrater/jerky maker to dry the apricots as well. Try looking up apricots on epicurious.com for some recipes to use up some of the fresh ones.

[Evil Queen]

Enough with dried apricots!

The Boyfriend and I have a dehydrator and we attempted to make dried apricots. However, they oxidized (turned brown) and grew mushy without drying out properly. Basically, we hastened the rotting and it just turned out badly. I have no idea what we did wrong. We're going to attempt it again, this time using a stronger ascorbic acid solution (vitamin C).

Recipes, I'd be happy to have them! Very soon I'll be making a cobbler with them.

[42_42_42]

a lot of dried apricots have sulfur added to them somehow to keep them from turning brown.

[Evil Queen]

...oh.

See, I knew that... but I didn't think of that.

[RetailWorkhorse]

*Points and cackles*

[Jester]

I don't know about apricots or dried fruit in general, but I do know that a lot of fruits (apples and avocados, for example) have lemon juice added to them to prevent browning/oxidization.

Just a thought.

[Shpepper]

Id drying them in whole pieces doesn't work, try making fruit leather. I do know you can make it from apricots. It's pretty much a thin layer of puree dried. Google for recipes. i don't have any personally, but it's another way to dry them.