A crazy and long week covering some forest fires out here.

Come Friday night I smelled like a campfire (albeit a raging, destructive one) but I was craving a project and even though we had to leave the house in a half  hour, I opened the refrigerator and saw the apricots silently calling to me. I had bought a pile the weekend before and left them to macerate in some sugar and fresh lemon juice and this amazing liquor that I have a crush on right now.

It’s called St-Germain and it’s made from elderflowers in France. The bottle is gorgeous and comes with this little blue and gold booklet that has very serious captions such as, “Un bohemien” underneath a picture of a romantically-disheveled man plucking huge white flowerbombs and gently placing them into a canvas sack, casually slung over his shoulder.

Apparently, these bohemiens gather all the elderflowers on the hillsides over a few days each spring and then pedal them to a distillery for that year’s batch of St-Germain. You would think a bottle of liquor that results from all that pedaling and gentle crushing of huge flowerheads would set you back a small villa, but it’s only about 30 bucks. Vraiment.

It could be that I'm a sucker and the company is using underage French child labor or gentically modified elderflowers. But I'm chosing to believe the marketing propeganda and we've been putting it in cocktails and testing it out with lemondade and stuff, so I decided to add a couple extra slugs to the big green pot of now-simmering apricots.

With the clock ticking, I whipped up three jars of apricot-elderflower jam in record time (I’ll share a technique I learned about in a forthcoming podcast). I thought it might not be sweet enough, but it turned out tangy and interesting with a deep apricot flavor and color.

 I am definitely feeling more bold in my jam-making these days. June Tayor’s sometimes-surprising and always-amazing flavors are a constant inspiration. And only making a few pots at a time frees me up to be more adventurous, so it’s not like I’m wasting a glut of fruit if something goes wrong.

Plenty of my spontaneous projects go deeply wrong (my family still begs me never to try limoncello again), but the stars aligned for this one and I emerged a cocky and victoruous jamming superhero.