Yes! To coincide with my retirement, my fruit trees decided to bear ... well, fruit. What else would a fruit tree bear? I have quite a few fruit bearing plants/trees. They are all fairly young and some are doing better than others. I have figs, lemons (x2), apricots, kumquats and another tree that I'm not sure what it is, but probably another apricot tree. The kumquat hasn't produced anything. Last year it had one tiny fruit on it. It's in a pot though and I've seen the cat in there quite a lot, so I think it's been subject to cat pee and I don't think it's going to last much longer. My apricot tree only had one apricot last year too, but this year it seems to have flourished. There's still quite a bit of fruit still on the tree after picking this lot:

One of the lemon tree/bush thing is producing lemons constantly. The other has only produced 4, but that's a start. The mystery tree has three fruit on it that look like they're ripe. I've just not picked them yet to see what they are. As I said, likely another apricot, but could be a peach. The fig tree is also very young and I think this is its first crop. There were about a dozen figs on it. I have read that they bear fruit twice a year, so I may get some more later.
Right, so what to do with the fruit? Make jam and ice cream.
Jam seems pretty easy - you take some fruit, add some lemon juice and sugar. Bring to a boil on a medium heat and then let kind of simmer on a low heat. The ratio seems to be 2lb of fruit with 1 cup of sugar and 2 tablespoons of lemon. The fig recipe had slightly more sugar 1½ cups, more lemon juice ¼ of cup and 2 tablespoons (weird way to write it) along with ¼ cup of water. Honestly think you need to try it and tweak it.
One thing I did find is the finer you chop the fruit, the smoother the jam. Depends if you want bits in your jam or not. I used a blender to chop it up. I didn't go as fine on the apricots as I did with the figs. I'll go finer with the apricots next time.
Mix in the bowl and as mentioned, bring to a boil then simmer for 20 - 25 minutes stirring every now and then. Then spoon into jars. As you can see the apricot yield was much better than the fig yield.
To make ice cream, the recipe seems the same as making jam and then you add the cream etc. I'm still balancing this out, but mix 1¼ cups of jam with the same amount of whole milk. Then add 2 - 3 cups of heavy cream and 2 tablespoons of vanilla extract. The 2 - 3 cups depends on how thick you want it. I'm still experimenting. Then put the mixture in the ice cream maker and let it do its thing for 20 - 25 minutes before putting into airtight containers and storing in the freezer.
Finally, add some chocolate sauce and a sprinkling of crushed nuts.
Displaying the first 10 blogs in the Stuff Archives, displayed in the order they were posted