25 Jul 2010, Posted by admin in EAT + DRINK, 1 Comments

Blenheim Apricots + A Jam To Remember

Apricots, like so many things, are easy to love when they’re all gussied up with sweet glazes. And yet in their raw, just-plucked state, they are all too often Farmers Market disappointments. Or at least so I thought, until I first tasted a Blenheim several years ago.

Where exactly the Blenheim apricot came from is foggy — whether it was in France’s Luxembourg Gardens around 1815, or England’s Blenheim Palace gardens several years later.  According to this San Francisco Chronicle article, both varieties wound up in California several decades later.  And so once a year, for a window of maybe two weeks, Blenheims appear at my market, all freckled and sensitive to the slightest changes in sunlight (my kindred stone fruit spirits).

This year, I promised myself I’d save a few to bake into a tart, maybe with an almond paste filling and definitely with a light glaze of jam from their fantastic We Love Jam colleagues of harvests past. Didn’t happen.

But I did get as far as packing chunky apricot bites into a generous dollop of plain Greek yogurt (full fat — these are Blenheims) with a spoonful of jam, a miraculous discovery that ranks right up there with the day I first tasted a certain dairy producer’s chocolate cream top yogurt (which incidentally also has an interesting history). Maybe if I stuck to such delicacies on Monday mornings, the work week would kick off with that Friday afternoon feeling. Ya, probably not going to happen.