Jammin'

Am I Martha Stewart or what? We finally managed to pick most of the apricots off of one of our apricot trees over the weekend. Last year, our harvest consisted of one apricot, which I duly cut into quarters so that each of us could appreciate a tiny little piece of it. As you can see, this year's harvest turned out...uh...differently.



In fact, we are now drowning in hundreds of ripe and semi-ripe apricots. There are still a number on the tree. And there's a whole tree we didn't touch because none of its apricots were ripe yet. Fortunately, there aren't that many on the second one! What does one do with this much fruit? Well, it's tasty, so we've eaten quite a lot of it, but see this picture of the pile of apricots in the basket? I think that represents about a tenth of all the apricots we picked. We've got *bags* of them.

Well, what would Martha do? Well, she'd make jam, of course! After realizing I didn't have a clue how to make jam...I didn't even know where to get jars...I took a trip to our friendly neighborhood OSH. After all, a store named "Orchard Supply" ought to have this kind of thing, right? Right. Two days and a lot of boiling water later, I've got jars and jars of the most delicious apricot jam ever. I'm giving it away (if you read this, you're local and you want some, drop on by!), but you know, I ate toast for lunch today, just so I could eat some jam and I think I might just drink the stuff. Yummmmeeeeee!!!

Oh, and the only thing I have to say about the kids in this post is that they love apricots, but Mam won't touch the jam and it looks like after downing one piece of apricot jam toast, Smunch has decided to stick with strawberry as well. Seriously. Whose kids are these??