One drawback of having one's husband go grocery shopping one week and oneself going the next, is the risk of making duplicate purchases. Especially when certain oft-used items are on sale.This happened to our household over the past two weeks, in the form of a vast overpurchase of grapefruit. We will usually buy 2 or 3 grapefruit a week (of which Gord eats 99.9%) but two weeks ago Gord bought a six-pack of grapefruit which were on sale for a really good price. I didn't realize this until the next week when I bought another six-pack, still on sale, thinking it was nice to get grapefruit on sale for a change! Only when I unloaded the groceries and told Gord about the great deal I got did I find out that we already had lots! So I thought: now is a good time to learn to make marmalade.
Gord's mom makes really good marmalade, so I dug out her recipe and decided to give it a try. It's a really easy looking recipe, with just chopped citrus fruit, water and sugar and a lot of boiling thereof. This melange is on the boil right now. I hope it turns out because otherwise I will have 13 jars of grapefruit soup!
Edited on February 5th to add: The marmalade turned out pretty
good! It is a little bit runnier than it should be, maybe because I added less sugar than the recipe called for, but it tastes very good!
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2 comments:
Kudos to you for learning to make something new!
A very important thing to remember with marmalade is that the pectin comes from the seeds. When you initially cut up the fruit, put all the seeds aside. In the final simmering when you want it to set up, tie them up in some cheesecloth and plunk them in the pot. Your marmalade will thicken beautifully.
Ack! I thought the pectin came from the peel! I took all the seeds out! It's amazing this stuff hangs together at all and doesn't just run off the side of my toast. It is quite delicious though, I must say!
Thanks for the tip Chile - I will remember to do that with the seeds on my next batch. I'll definitely be making it again, because it was so easy. And cheap too! My rough calculations for the ingredients alone are about 49 cents per 1 cup jar. Even if that doubled to include the energy costs, that is still really inexpensive.
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