Dried Apricots

 Yesterday was all about drying apricots.

It was quite a process.

I borrowed a food dehydrator from a friend.

Then I commenced to slicing, pitting, and de-stringing

the apricots.  I pushed their backs forward and

tore the halves in half, making quarters, of course.

These quarters had to go in a citrus bath for 5 minutes.

Then onto the dehydrator trays...

And into the dehydrator,

Then came lots of checking and WAITING...

and checking and nibbling and WAITING...

and checking and switching trays and nibbling

(as you might suppose, nibbling

was the BEST part!)

and taking a few out

and turning them and nibbling

and WAITING...

and so on and so forth,

until...

finally,

they were dry,

(around 10 hours later).

Was it worth it???

You'll have to ask me later,

when we start eating them!

Right now, I'm not sure.

With all this, I haven't had too much time

for hook work, but...

I've made a start on a pink pair

of Kay Meador's crocheted sneakers.

I'll let you know when I get to the pink part!

Fireworks and Apricots

Today we had a great and productive family day!

We had the fun of firing off fireworks together.

Then we finally started to harvest the apricots.

As you can see they are small,
but there are a lot of them!

After washing them, we started to cut them up.

But given how many apricots we have,
I knew that was going to take forever,
so I decided to use my chopper to
speed things up a bit.

The older boys helped with the pitting process.

8cups apricots (pitted and de-stringed)
1/4cup lemon juice
5cups sugar

Bring to a rolling boil and boil for 30 minutes,
stirring FREQUENTLY.

Apricot jam bubbling; water-bath coming to a boil.

Almost ready!

Time to fill the jam jars:

Now for 10 minutes in the water bath.

That's beautiful!  :)

One of my readers asked what I was going to do
with my apricots.  Well, this is the first step.
We're going to try drying some as well,
as well as get another batch of jam going.

Plus, we're just going to eat some
of them FRESH, of course!!!