The first step is to get the right kind of oranges. Not navels, they're too sweet. It has to be seville oranges, which are too sour to be good for anything else. But the thing is that seville oranges are only in season for five minutes, and that brief season has never before coincided with me feeling like making marmalade or having a recipe or even the other ingredients.
So, I when I saw Nigel Slater's marmalade recipe in the paper a couple of weeks ago I tore it out and thought, I wonder if you can still get seville oranges in the shops... but didn't actually go looking for them.
Then Faye came to stay for a few days and on Saturday, a full week after I got the recipe, we had lunch at the local farm shop. And guess what they had on sale? Seville oranges. I vaguely remembered the recipe so bought 12, for the princely sum of £1.46. Obviously on a roll now, I found a bag of preserving sugar in the back of the cupboard, plus I had a couple of lemons and a good stockpile of jars.
That just left the muslin bag. Muslin - where do you get muslin these days? My one and only piece of muslin was a tiny square I got with some skin cleanser. A kitchen shop, maybe? Searches brought up all kinds of weird
jelly-straining solutions and even a dainty, Delia-approved cloth (as small as my facecloth),but not plain muslin bags. Then I had a brainwave - I thought of those muslin cloths you use with tiny babies, to protect your shoulder from burped-up milk. Visited Sainsbury on the way home from work one night and bingo, there they were: five giant muslin squares for a fiver. The woman at the checkout said, "I didn't think you could still get these!"
So last night I started to make marmalade. One of the oranges had started to go off, so I threw in another lemon. First, trim the peel off the fruit and slice it up. Squeeze the juice from the pulp into a jug. Easy-peasy lemon squeezy! An hour later and I was still peeling and chopping and squeezing, hands sticky and stinging. At long last I was done and put the whole lot together in my biggest pot: peel, juice and water to make four litres, and the pulp and pips bound up in a muslin square (previously washed and rinsed).
That sat overnight. The rest would be a breeze compared with the preparation, I thought. I got up early this morning, ready to knock out a few jars of marmalade before walking the dog. Poooooooor Bertie. Once I'd decanted the whole lot into the preserving pan (you're not supposed to leave acid mixtures in it for too long I read somewhere ... though I can't find anything like that on the net) it took over half an hour to come to the boil. Then it simmered for an hour while I had breakfast. After that I was supposed to fish out the bag of pulp, let it cool and squeeze out as much juice as possible into the pan, add the sugar and boil the whole mess fast for quarter of an hour, until a spoonful set in a saucer. Ha ha ha!!!
I should have known better - in fact later on I looked up Nigel's recipe on the net and saw he'd added some extra stuff ... like that this stage could take longer than 15 minutes. A lot longer. It took forever to wrestle with the pulp-stuffed muslin (hot! hot!) and melt the sugar in, and then get the mix boiling again. By the time gotten sick of waiting for the mixture to wrinkle on the saucer and Bertie was definitely sick of waiting for a walk, the windows were running with condensation and the kitchen and I were a sticky mess.
I poured the marmalade into the jars and bolted the lids on - done! Bottled sunshine. I have to say it does taste lovely. Really tangy and fresh. And it might even set.
In other news, I went to the doctor this afternoon about my bunions - or at least the one that occasionally causes me to shriek with pain as I put in the clutch. He wasn't in the least bit interested ("The surgeon won't want to see you until it's MUCH more distorted, red and inflamed."), but did take my blood pressure (the conversation idled around from feet to knees to weight) and it turns out to be too high. High enough to catch his attention. So now I've got to go to the practice nurse (though I'd rather have a real one, ha ha) and have my blood pressure taken next week and the week after.
I didn't tell him about the marmalade.
Weather: It snowed madly in London and the south-east and now it's snowing madly up north. It has not, as yet, snowed madly in Edinburgh. We had a few flurries, followed by slush. Quite annoying.
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