Marmalade Update

It was rather amiss of me not to write an update about the marmalade. According to the instructions I was following there are a couple of ways to know if a preservative has reached its setting point. These include using a thermometer and when a certain temperature has been reached then the setting point has also been achieved, and a second method involves letting a small bit of the preservative lie on a cold plate for a couple of minutes and if it has the consistency you require then it too has reached the setting point.

I went with the first method of setting the marmalade, but I must have done something wrong. The marmalade is very runny, but on the other hand it is absolutely delicious. Anyway, I still have several jars of blueberry jam to get through until we can start on the marmalade and I am hoping that it will have set a little by then. If not, it will make for a delicious orange marmalade sauce.

Orange Marmalade

In the middle of winter there are not many fruits that are in season, but one such useful fruit is the Seville Orange, which is available between January and February. The Seville Orange is also known as bitter orange, and has a very bitter or sour taste, but the reason I am interested in it is its use in making marmalade. Following a recipe from the Preserves book in the River Cottage Handbook series, today I bought a kilo of Seville Oranges and two kilos of demerara sugar.

So far I have cut the oranges up, squeezed the juice out and shredded the peel. Once this was done, I re-added the juice and covered the shredded peel with water. It is currently in my kitchen looking a bit like this:

 

They will remain in the bowl for 24 hours before being turned into about 6 450g jars of marmalade.

The seeds that I planted the other week are coming up well, and only a couple of seeds don't appeared to have come through, but there are plenty to help me start a herb garden once they get a big bigger and it gets a bit warmer outside. This is what it currently looks like on my kitchen window sill:

I think, moving from left-to-right we have sage, basil, chives and oregano but, due to my lousy record-keeping, I will have a much better idea when they grow a bit more.