The local FFA chapters sell boxes of fruit at Christmas for their annual fund raiser. Of course, we bought some! How can you say no to sweet pleading faces???!! Apparently, lots of other people did ,too. We received several generous gift baskets containing oranges, pears and grapefruits. I must admit that we were guilty of tucking an orange or two in our gift baskets, too.
After about two weeks of eating fresh fruit nearly every day, we still had lots of oranges. I had often thought about making orange marmalade and decided this was the time to try it. I used the recipe from this excellent site : http://www.simplycanning.com/
In hind sight, New Year's Eve was probably not an ideal time to tackle this......
This recipe call for boiling the fruit a bit and then letting it set for over 12 hours. So obviously this project lapped over in to today. That worked out well because I was tired form working in the barn kitchen yesterday.
So bright and early this morning, I got up and started gathering up all my canning supplies. I bought myself several dozen of the Tattler reusable canning lids for Christmas and planned on giving them a test run.
This recipe does not include pectin so I had to boil the marmalade for what seemed like eons to get it to gel. It was certainly longer than the 30 minutes indicated in the recipe but I did not use as much orange peel so that may have been the problem.
So far-- so good! I only used four of the Tattler lids since I have never used them before and they require just a bit different handling than I am used to with the conventional lids. Besides, I intend to give the smaller jars away as gifts to friends...... I like my friends but not enough to give them my new lids!
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