Canning Notes: Apricots

Apricots hit the grocery store earlier this month, and they were so good! I wanted to do something more than just eat them! So I scoured Pinterest and came up with these three ideas:

:::Apricot Salsa (eaten fresh, not canned)
I used my Pampered Chef food chopper to cut everything. It ended up being very spicy because I didn't seed the jalepeno, and very garlicky. It was also very delicious. I added a purple onion for texture and color. Yum.

:::Apricot Preserves
My goal is to use much less sugar in my fruit preservation. So when I found this jam recipe using only honey and no pectin, I was intrigued. Would it be sweet enough? Turns out, the answer was "no". I didn't want to add more honey, because it was quite tart and I wanted the overall flavor to be apricots, not honey. So I added 2 cups of sugar. I also added a vanilla bean for a subtle vanilla flavor. I got three half-pints.

:::Apricot Halves in Honey Syrup
I let the apricots ripen on the counter just a little more before moving to my next project. I got 3 pints of apricot halves. They look so beautiful in the jars! We haven't tasted them yet, so I'm hoping that they will be sweet enough! I referenced my Ball preserving book and the time for cold-packed apricots was 25 minutes, so I increased the time from linked recipe from 10 minutes to 25 minutes. They still look quite firm in the jar.

And there you have it! I purchased about 8 pounds of apricots from my grocery store for these three recipes. I haven't really looked to the grocery store for my canning projects before, especially with fruit, but the apricots were just begging to be put up!