Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

On occasion, I find myself with more to do and less time in which to do it than I had planned.  Actually, I find that to be true on most occasions -- just about every day, in fact.  I know I'm not alone here -- at least I hope I'm not. 

Even when I have one of my favorite summer shopping binges at a Greenmarket, I plan to eat more fresh produce than G and I can actually tuck away during the course of a week.  That's how I recently opened the door of the fridge and found myself in possession of raspberries, blueberries, day-neutral strawberries (which are smaller, sweeter, intensely perfumed, and red all the way through), apricots, peaches and cherries. 

I knew that all this bounty would not get eaten in its natural state before it began to spoil, so muffins were the first order of business.  I found a delicious blueberry muffin recipe (originally introduced to me by none other than Zarah), modified it slightly, added all three kinds of berries and voila!  Several days worth of breakfast and the berries were saved in the meantime.

My favorite recent culinary accomplishment was yesterday's project.    No, that's not cheese sauce in that bowl.  I was browsing my way through several searches on apricots, lazily looking for preserves, when I happened on several different sites that mentioned apricot curd.  Being a long-time lover of both lemon curd and apricots, this struck me as a delightful possibility for the apricots in the fridge, just sitting there in all their blushing glory waiting for something to happen.  The recipes I saw were not promising, since they all used what seemed to me extremely high ratios of sugar to fruit.  Eggs and butter are one thing, but apricots are too delicate to oversweeten.  To me they lose all their luscious perfume if they're combined with too much sugar. 

Long story short, I more or less morphed what I 'd read and devised my own recipe, with a puree made of lightly cooked and sieved apricots, the juice of a lemon, eggs, butter, and about one-fourth the sugar called for in other recipes.   This is glorious stuff.  I ate it on the berry muffins for breakfast, but my favorite use for apricot curd thus far is to open the fridge every time I pass by, pick up a spoon and start eating. 

Due to imminent departure and the need to go start packing, I won't post recipes for either of these treats right now, but will be happy to do so later.   G's and my other enormous change at the last minute has been a complete rearrangement of our vacation plans.   We had originally planned to drive cross-country and be gone for more than three weeks.  Because of (positive) developments in a burgeoning entrepreneurial endeavor of G's, he can't be out of town for that long.  So tomorrow (or today, actually) I fly to New Orleans, G joins me later in the week and we come home together.  (I've already got the ingredients for tomorrow's "plane sandwich", and have several lists of New Orleans restaurants -- far more than I can possibly try in four days). 

We're home for a few days, and then in early August we fly out to San Francisco for nine days in the Bay Area with friends.  All this re-configuring has actually turned out to be less stressful than our original plans, although we both feel a bit wistful about missing some of our envisioned stops.  In the meantime, any plaintive yearnings can always be staved off with another spoonful of apricot curd.

Comments

[Zarah Maria]

Hi Julie! I hope you have an amazing vacation regardless of all the changes - you've done what you could to start them off well, that's for sure! Mmmm, berry muffins with apricot curd...

[Joe C]

Where's mine?
But seriously...I just wanted to say that your blog is brilliant as ever and the pics look better than ever. Also that the best food I had in East Africa was curry.

[Tyler]

I love lemon curd, too, and am ready for the apricot variety---if only I could pass by your fridge for a spoonful.

Safe travels and happy eating...
Tyler

[melanie plesh]

Your fruit entry reminds me about the 10 plums I have that I want to treat with respect. Have you an idea?

[Julie]

Hey Zarah -- if you're an apricot lover, you should try this apricot curd whenever I get around to posting the recipe...

Hi bro -- glad you're back safely. If you want apricot curd, I have some for you!

Same goes for you, Tyler -- we'll hook up at some point and I'll share the wealth.

Melanie! How nice of you to come visit the blog. I missed you on that last day in glorious N.O. As for plums, one of my absolute favorite things is an easy-but-impressive plum torte from Marian Burros. It specifies Italian prune plums, but I use any kind of plum, and indeed any kind of fruit. A link for the recipe is here:

http://splendidtable.publicradio.org/recipes/dessert_plum.html

But perhaps you had something else in mind....oven-roasted plums in wine and honey? Preserves? A plum tart? hmmmm....

[violet]

i could see where an apricot curd recipe could probably use too much sugar. it's probably based muchly on lemon curd recipes which need of course need that sugar to balance the tartness. (just thinking outloud)

i can't wait to see this recipe! and oh, san francisco. sf is my favourite city at the moment.

[Molly]

Julie, that apricot curd looks and sounds scrumptious. I eagerly await your return from N.O. and S.F., so that I can get my greedy hands on the recipe! Oh, and by the way, I see that you too are a fan of Marian Burros' plum torte. Isn't that the most simple, spectacular thing? It's wonderful with apricots too, just in case you have a few left over from your curd-making...

[Julie]

Violet and Molly -- recipe is on the way! I just completed a second batch to give to friends, so I've done a bit of work on figuring out quantities.

[female viagra]

Very delicous, thanks for great recipe

[Tia]

Lemon curd and apricots! Delicious! Thank you.