Make Orange Jam

Abel & Cole send us a box of unwashed vegetables and fruit every week. It is left in the plastic greenhouse outside the back door.

Since Christmas they seem to have had a special deal with the orange suppliers of Spain as we have had streams of oranges (and clems, tangerines, etc) flooding through each week. Now I am not that into eating oranges. I normally eat biscuits and toast and things like that unless Rob cooks a nice pasta. (That;'s why I need to go on these diets because otherwise i eat all sorts of crap. Like right now, I am eating shortbreads that I picked up free at the local shop, they are past their sell-by date but taste none the worse for that!).

Eventually we had a mountain of oranges piled up in the fruit bowl, one or two went mouldy of course as citrus does.

And then Rob caught the epidemic flu-cough of Ealing. And I looked after him. And I saw those oranges, and my friend Anna told me that vitamin C helps during a cold (but not. apparently, beforehand, to build resistance; that is apparently a myth)

So I got this idea.

And I spent ages squeezing every last orange by hand into a jug and it made the most amazing elixir of life you can imagine. It was SO delicious despite the hard work. A lot of the oranges were blood oranges, so the juice was very sweet and very red.

And then of course, there was a mountain of orange peel, and not being one to countenance unnecessary waste, I bethought myself to adapting a marmalade recipe.

These being sweet oranges, they aren't the right thing, but there they were, these hundreds of orange skins, all plump and mangled and I couldn't bear to throw them away. So i stuck them in my giant cooking pot and poured in some water and a bag of sugar. And this time I kept an eye on it so it didnt burn, even though it took ages to boil down. and then I made pots and pots and pots of the stuff.

Maybe you are one of the lucky recipients of one of these pots and can give me some feedback.

Rob loves it but then he loves everything I made so far! (apart from the whelks, that wasnt popular even with him)

Then I got the Epic Flu thing and we both lay on the sofa for three days eating orange jam on sourbread.