Five Fun Things to Do with Citrus (aka Marmalade Marathon)

...and half the fruit didn't even have stickers

It is citrus season and even in the frozen hinterlands where I live the grocery store carts are overflowing with fruit. So much so that I could get 10 oranges for $1 last week. I bought more than my fair share of all manner and flavor of citrus fruits without having any idea what I was going to make or if I had what I needed. But I was determined to make. Then I came home and game planned (yes this is the wrong order) and realized I had to go back to the store and get both more jars and more specific fruits. After hemming and hawing for 2 days I settled on 5 recipes which is proof that 1. I am unable to control canning urges and 2. I had no idea how difficult citrus could be. But I had 30 temple oranges, 15 blood oranges, 9 navel oranges and 9 grapefruit waiting to be transformed.
I should also mention that I had never made marmalade before. I have “tried” twice before by buying citrus which I used in any number of other things before I even looked at a marmalade recipe. It was like I had some sort of subconscious block preventing me from marmaladery. And even moving into my most recent batch of madness I kept trying to back out at the same time I was buying more fruit.

This turns out to be not without foundation because marmalade was hard for me. I found myself continually impatient, bored and distracted, or trying to find shortcuts. Only once was this actually helpful and that result was mixed.

My biggest warning before you begin is know that making marmalade takes way more time than making other fruit concoctions (yes waiting for jelly juice to strain can take a while but you can walk away safely and do something else). You have to slice the peel into itty bitty slivers which are often thinner than my chubby fingers will let me slice. Some recipes require you to take off the membranes on each segment of fruit. I haven’t seen a recipe citrus marmalade recipe that calls for added pectin so you will be stirring and testing gel stages for a while. And some recipes call for a multiple hour wait period or several rounds of boiling in fresh water to get rid of bitterness from the rind. Unlike with the stock making I was pretty much constantly in the kitchen and I couldn’t really multitask. My 1 day marathon stretched into 4.

I spent a tremendous amount of time standing in front of this counter.

But I did in fact survive and I have 43 vibrant jars in storage plus a handful of remnants that didn’t quite fill a jar sitting in my fridge. I managed to make it through all five recipes and I got some bonus goodies out of the work. I also tried a few new-to-me techniques which I will recap in their own post.

Three marmalades, liquored preserves and a fruit salad

Here are my offerings complete with the many things that went wrong. Just like the canary promised.

1.  Grapefruit Marmalade
2. Blood oranges in Orangecello
3. Morning Whiskey Marmalade
4. Mixed Citrus Salad
5. Hot Blooded Marmalade
6. What went wrong (and a few things that went right)

A note on the “stumpy” jars. When packing up each recipe I filled one stumpy (or different) jar. These jars were given to me full of marmalade and other goodies by a friend who also cans and is much better at marmalade than I am because she is more patient. These jars are my very late Christmas offering to her.