Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Squirrel Nut Stew

Spent a weekend in the woods and collected a few mushies plus some fresh squirrel! I've also had a bumper crop of sweet chestnuts and walnuts from trees down the road. So i had a superb stew made largely from wild local food, apart from the flour (Waitrose farm in Hampshire), thyme (Dennis' allottment), salt (Maldon's, Essex), oil (olive but local rapeseed would be perfectly good substitute. I just happen to have a five gallon bottle of olive oil that was given so am making good use of it!) and carrots (Abel & Cole). Here is my recipe for squirrel stew, incorporating Tristram's suggestions about the first stage for the meat: Preparation stage: 1 squirrel, skiined and prepared ( see Flickr for details of how to do this) A few ounces of flour with salt and thyme mixed in Oil For the stew 1 or more penny buns (cep mushroom) A few spiny puffballs Handful of Amethyst Deceivers Handful of sweet chestnuts , peeled Handful of walnuts Water 6 medium size Chopped carrots Sp
2 comments
Read more

Life Returns to Notment - and my soul

It has been such a long time, we had so much cold and rain and snow this winter that I have hardly been down to the notment at all. A couple of weeks ago I did go, and collected some baby Alexanders , which went down very well with the family. They are very herbal, like fennel, aniseed or celery but stronger and with a distinct flavour. They work very well chopped up with mashed potato or in an omelette. Then yesterday I went back for a propoer look at the spring life. Many of the fragile little seedlings planted last year in their fleece-poo blankets are still alive if not exactly thriving - including a sage, some fennel cuttings, a feverfew and calamint. Sadly though, the huge ants nest has gone since the breeze blocks were sold to alocal builder who has been able to reuse them. I had been hoping to provide a new home for the ants, but failed to act in time and so now just have to wait and see if they managed to survive or not. I am fairly ignorant about the habits of ants, but
5 comments
Read more

Snow and Honey

Monday was a day famous for Snow, but for me it was also about honey. I visited Linda who has recently started keeping bees. We processed some honey and she very kindly gave me a pot of golden sweetness at the end. I learnt about mites, and deaths, and bee dancing and pollen and nectar and propolis (the red stuff in the pot - very sticky and it stains the hands, the bees make it from tree resin), and how the bees tenderly care for the grubs and feed them bees milk, and how the worker bees come out of the growing chambers and do housekeeping first for a few days, and then nursing, and then they guard the entrance, and then they start foraging only after all that. The pics show how we scraped the honey out of the combs, avoiding letting pollen and nectar into the honey, and let it drip through a net to separate it from the wax - collecting the was crumbs for melting down and further separation from the honey that is left; propolis; and the honey pots that were filled. 20 in total, from a
4 comments
Read more