Yesterday, my friend, Meg, and I went on our second annual trip to  Andy’s Orchard in Morgan Hill, California for fruit tasting, orchard tour, and pick your own trifecta.  Our mission?  Capture the essence of California summertime by picking and making our own Apricot preserves … with fresh from the tree ingredients!

Our adventure started out in front of the orchard with the biggest stone fruit tasting spread you’ll see.  I’d guess there were 75 varieties of cherries, apricots, peaches, and pluots for the crowd to enjoy.  This was quite a unique experience as many of these little tastes are from single trees that Andy has in the orchard.   They were delicious.  We cruised around and tried all the little baskets our stomachs allow.  Since we were ‘pro’s’ at this tour now, we stopped just short of overdose since we knew there are more goodies to be had out in the orchard.

Next, it’s time to head out to the orchard for our tour and apricot picking.  The apricot trees are way out back so we made a few stops on the journey and soaked up quite a bit of information from our tour guide as we passed by a variety of trees.  Here are some of the nuggets:

• Most orchards will ‘pick a tree’ just one time.  That means that they remove all the fruit from a tree the same day.  Ripe to unripe, they are all coming off.  Andy ‘picks a tree’ multiple times so that they take the fruit off at its peak.  That translates to … great taste.
• As we made a stop at the peach trees, we learned when you pick a perfectly ripe peach, it will get five bruises.  Why?  The fruit is so delicate at this stage that those are the bruises from your fingertips as you caress the fruit off the tree.  So next time you see a bruised peach at the farmer’s market, think twice before passing it by.
• Since we were past prime for cherries at Andy’s, we didn’t spend a lot of time picking at these trees, but we did find a little surprise.  Our guide points out the numerous little cherries that have dried on the tree.  He called it jam on a pit.  Delicious, concentrated raisin-like morsels made for us by mother nature.

Finally, we made it out to the apricots.  Meg and I broke off from the crowd to find the best ‘low-hanging’ fruit to pick.  At first, we were a little worried that the fruit seems a little too hard.  I decided to take a bite to see what the outside translated to on the inside.  Juicy, sweet, ready for jam!  We picked away and headed on home with the best of summer in our buckets.

We chose a low sugar, no pectin, recipe from our online internet search to guide the process.  Mom joined us for the canning festivities, and we all got to work cleaning and preparing the jars and apricots for canning.  By the time all was said and done, we made three batches of the recipe which translated to 11 – 8 ounce half pint jars of preserves.  Two notes:  if you are looking for the nuts to bolts how-to for preserving, nothing can beat Ball’s comprehensive book on the topic, if you want a typically sweet apricot jam,  here’s a common recipe.

When the last jar was pulled from the boiling water, we all kicked up our feet and imagined how we would use the bounty of preserves.  Here are some of our ideas:

• OK, so this first one we tried right away.  Mom made up some cranberry scones which we used to help us ‘taste-test’ the preserves.  Yum!
• Apricot + Pork = Good Stuff.  Meg suggested we might use the preserves in some sort of sauce over pork.
• What about brie en croute?  Or maybe just trim off the top of a brie round, slather on the preserves, heat, and serve?
• Orrr.  What about a grilled cheese sandwich with brie and apricot preserves?

Whether you pick your own and make your own preserves, like we did, or you just take the tour and ‘buy your own’ in the orchard store, I encourage you to get out there and see where your food grows …  at Andy’s or a farm near you!