The motherload…

We ate a LOT of apricots and peaches, and gave many away to friends and neighbors.

I like canned peaches. So, we made 7 quarts. In light syrup so we don’t get too fat eating these in the winter.

After canning peaches in syrup, we had some leftover, so it went into a bag and into the freezer. This will be a great cobbler.

Apricot preserves – 12 half-pints. I didn’t add any pectin. Instead we cooked it for a good 45 minutes to get the natural pectin out of the fruits. It’s a soft-set, but has REALLY GREAT flavor.

Peach butter. 4 pints. Peach butter doesn’t have any fat in it. It’s called “butter” because it’s very spreadable fruit with little added sugar. After canning, we had a few tablespoons left over. It went over the top of the apricot cobbler. Yeah, we baked too…

My friend came over to help with drying, and we ended up making an apricot cobbler. This is not a picture of my cobbler, but it looked just about identical…

Dried apricots. We didn’t use sulfur to keep the orange color, so they turn brown when they dry. They still taste really good. I forgot to set an alarm to wake up in the middle of the night and turn down the dryer. They got done in about 14 hours, instead of the usual 18.

I selected the prettiest tiny little apricots to make apricot bounce – apricots with sugar drowned in straight brandy. The jar will sit until Christmas, then we get boozy on fruit!