Yesterday, I bought a basket of fresh apricots, and even though I usually am drooling over recipes for making fresh apricot tarts, adding butter and sugar and almond paste, maybe cream - muttering to myself, "oh, yeah, it's fine for you [California-based recipe writer's name goes here] to come up with a recipe for fresh apricots that you can get all the time" - today I am instead trawling for recipes that can somehow preserve the apricots, to be eaten in more healthful food combinations, with yogurt, or maybe grilled meats.

I am kind of taken with the idea of apricot chutney, but the 2 recipes I've looked at so far both want you to add fresh mint and/or lime juice at the last minute, and that doesn't jive so well with my notion of preserving ... and I have made a perfectly good chutney from dried apricots.

I flirted briefly with the apricot butter recipe from the NYT last Sunday, but it wants 4 pounds of apricots, and I only have 2, and besides, it sounds messy and a little dangerous - the instructions say to wear mitt-type hot pads, to protect your arms from molten apricot splatters.

I think I am going to go with poaching them in a light syrup with honey - they'll keep in the fridge for a long time that way, although I will be risking the temptation to pair the apricots with vanilla ice cream (caramel, mmm, little sprinkle of granola, crystalized ginger ...), not to mention the looming pitfall, in poaching as a preparation, of taking fresh apricots and turning them into something strongly resembling the canned variety.