Apricot Nectar

I recently bought a little over a 1/2 bushel of apricots. That's over 25 pounds. And you know what, that amount of fruit doesn't overwhelm me anymore. In fact, I wish I had another 25 pounds. Especially now that I am a proud owner of a chest freezer. I now say to the season: bring it!

The apricots I bought were a bit soft, and some were really soft. So, there was still a need to move quickly. First, I made five pints of apricot jam with the softest ones. A saucy jam with lemon, vanilla and almond brandy, it will do nicely on yogurt. I removed the stones from four quarts of apricots, and in the freezer they went. I planned on doing some apricot butter with some of the other really soft ones, but first I made apricot nectar. Apricot nectar can do lots of things, besides being simply delicious, and what is left over is half-way to butter!

Adapted from The Joy of Cooking (although The Joy of Jams, Jellies, etc. by Linda Ziedrich also has a good apricot nectar recipe)

3 quarts of apricots, pits removed

3 cups of water

Add all to heavy pot or dutch oven. Simmer gently until fruit is soft (or softer than it was to start). Strain, and instead of pushing the fruit, be patient and let it drain on it's own.

You can can this in pint jars, in a boiling water bath for fifteen minutes. Or, you can freeze it. Or you can stash the almost two quart yield in the fridge to make sorbet, jelly, salad dressing, or just to drink. All of which are on my mind.

You will be left with a good amount of pulp. I had a quart, to which I added another quart of fresh fruit and started a slow cooker apricot butter, a la Food in Jars' blueberry butter recipe. Let the apricot games begin!

Another Random Salad

I just thought this was the prettiest salad. First of the cucumbers with local crumbled feta, and local black raspberries macerated with some sugar and white balsamic vinegar.

Fresh from the Garden Salad

I am in love with this photograph. It looks like a painting. It's slight blurriness and bright sun just feel so romantically hopeful, and the background tan of the lawn so bleak and washed out. There's a story in there. A story of a person in the midst of a drought who picked their first batch of chioggia beets, their hand clutching the bunch with pride. Somehow, in this moment, the beets were all she needed.

This salad makes me proud because it's almost all from my garden, and entirely local (excluding the dressing). The only thing I didn't grow was the corn, which is from Davenport's Farm in Stone Ridge. I grilled it and cut it off the ear to add to the salad. The rest is sugar snap peas, green beans (Hank's Xtra White) both blanched first, beets boiled off, and scallions. Tossed with a vinaigrette. That's it. There aren't many recipes flying around here lately because when you have stuff like this you just prepare it the way it needs to, and toss it in a bowl. That's how we eat summer. Yesterday I made kale salad and it was simply this: steam kale until tender, chop up coarsely, add a cup of pickled carrots and their brine, and voila, an insanely tasty and healthy salad that just gets better as it sits. No oil.

In the meantime, while you're making summer salads, check out Tigress' giveaway for The Lost Art of Real Cooking by Ken Albala (he has a blog, Ken Albala's Food Rant) and Rosanna Nafziger (her blog is Paprika Head). This book came my way, too, and I'm pretty impressed with it. When I first began reading it, I thought, well, now here's a book that's pretty much all about what I like to do and then some! That's always a good thing to think when cracking a book. I'm planning on making beer following their recipe, and when I do, I'll have a giveaway as well. So if you don't win Tigress' giveaway, come back over here in a bit and try again!

Angel Food Cake and Mayonnaise

The way I get better at cooking is usually tied directly with having too much of something, or needing to get rid of something, or if something is on sale. I'm a frugal girl and don't like anything to go to waste. Now that I have a constant supply of huge, fresh, amazing eggs there are a lot of things I'm now tackling that I hadn't thought to before. There are always recipes out there that focus on a glut of something, as that's what people had to do. One year blight robbed you of red tomatoes, so you learn how to make green tomato chutney (last year). A glut of eggs allows me to be generous with them and still have enough left over to experiment. And what delicious experiments!

After I had made the pot de créme, I had some whites leftover. I added a few more whites to the batch in order to come up with the 1 1/2 cups of egg whites needed for angel cake. I used the recipe from Joy of Cooking and even though I didn't add the cream of tartar, I was still pretty happy with the outcome. And with some of that mulberry rhubarb lemon jam over it, I was even happier!

With the four little yolks leftover from that, I had to make mayonnaise. I can't throw anything out, and why should I when this is the result? The mayonnaise is so rich and gorgeous, if I didn't have to go in for a cholesterol check soon, I'd want to eat it with a spoon. We had it in salmon salad, and then with cold boiled potatoes for dinner on one of these hot and sultry days we've been having. Salads are the thing for this heat wave.

p.s. Do you call it Angel Food Cake or Angel Cake? The recipe calls it Angel Cake, but I always knew it as Angel Food Cake.

N.B. Popular consensus says Angel Food Cake. Herewith amended in the title.

Meeting the Canjammers

Here is a vanilla pot de créme that I made entirely with cream. The recipe calls for milk or half and half. It was a special occasion, and it deserved all cream. That and the fact that I had a half-gallon of cream in the fridge. Shae from Hitchhiking to Heaven was coming to visit, and I needed something special for dessert that was gluten-free. I needn't have worried, for we tasted five different jams, and had brandied apricots and special local chocolate as well. And I was worried about dessert??

You should read about Shae and I met and became friends, even though she lives in Northern California and I live in upstate New York. We bonded through a recipe for clementine marmalade. It's a wonderful story that Shae captures perfectly.

Here are two of her blackberry mojito jams. Did you know that she won nine awards in the Marin County Fair? I covet her beautiful fruit masterpieces.

We also tasted two jams from the same recipe. Isn't amazing how different they are? When Doris and Jilly came to visit, she brought with her a gift of this Fig Lemon Lavender jam, and as she did she said, "You didn't make this, did you? Because I know someone did." I said no, but remembered that someone indeed had made the same jam. The next day when I met Sarah Hood from Toronto Tasting Notes, she handed me the same jam! What's wonderful, aside from getting great goods from great peeps, is that no two jams are the same, even if you are making them yourself from the same fruit, in the same kitchen. They are always different. These two were both gorgeous beauties in their own right.

The next day was spent meeting more good canning folk over at Thompson-Finch farms where the strawberries are organic and lush. Or were. They are all gone now. This was a few weeks ago. Here's my haul, that I got thanks to Shae. I could never pick this much while chasing around the little toddler.

And afterwards, Kate (Hip Girls Guide to Homemaking), Tigress (Tigress in a Jam and Pickle) and Shae, busted out some serious picnic under the shade tree for post-berry picking talk.

It was a gorgeous spread and an inspiring day. Tigress talks about it here. And Kate describes her day here. And Shae does here. How can you go wrong with like-minded folks, good food, and strawberry picking? I'm so glad I got the chance to meet everybody. It makes this online world so much more special. And it happens a lot more than you think!

I went home and made some strawberry ice cream. Amazingly, I didn't make strawberry jam immediately! I had plenty of cream. And plenty of strawberries. And there was nothing better to do than to sit with a bowl of fresh ice cream, and savor the days.