The KCET Food Recipe Contest: Plums, Pluots, Apricots
The contest is now closed.
Our glorious California summer fruit season is in full swing, so KCET Food and the Hollywood Farmer's Kitchen are celebrating it with this month's recipe contest. The featured ingredients: plums, apricots and pluots!
A pluot, still a relatively unknown fruit, is a hybrid of a plum and an apricot. It's sweeter than a lot of plums, but firmer than an apricot -- we have Luther Burbank to thank for coming up with the mix, though he called them plumcots. There are now a number of varieties available throughout the season: The fruits are bountiful at Southern California farmers' markets now and for the next couple of months (the specimens in the photos are from the Malibu and Palisades markets), so buy local if you're able!
The creator of our very favorite recipe will win a gift basket full of goods made in Southern California, including:
- Three bags of flavored almonds (ginger, coconut and rosemary) from Wasco's Fat Uncle Farms
- A Hungry Tiger Hot Sauce t-shirt from Flavour Gallery in downtown L.A.
- A jar of balsamic barbecue sauce from David's Unforgettables in San Fernando Valley.
- A can of olives from Graber Olive House in Ontario.
- Fresh pasta, lemon-artichoke tapenade, sun-dried tomato pesto and a jar of sun-dried tomatoes from Domenico's Foods in Beverly Hills.
No recipe is too simple or too complicated; as long as one or all of the three fruits are the primary ingredients, it's a contender. Just be sure to submit the recipe by 3 p.m. on Friday, July 27, 2012.
Leave it in the comments section below or email it to
Living editor Katherine Spiers by the deadline. We'll spend the week with Chef Ernest Miller of the HFK cooking and tasting the submissions, and the winner will be announced at noon on August 2.
Happy cooking!