Marmalazy

I'm not a fan of quick 'n lazy cooking because to me cooking is therapy and I swear, 20 minutes of therapy is nothing, it's like a stone skipping off a lake. I need to sink and submerge to feel better. Nothing heals me as much as hours of complicated time-consuming steps to complete a recipe. The longer it takes to make the meal the less time I have left to deal with the noise in my head. In fact, in short, the more I deal with the meal the more I heal. 

I'm sorry! I couldn't help it. It was so obvious I couldn't resist... (Don't worry, I'm throwing up a little in my mouth too...)

Anyway, sometimes I forget this. I focus on the time consuming part and forget the me involvement part. I hit upon marmalade last week. That takes ages right? It's almost like spending the whole day with a therapist. Great idea! And being, well, ME, I didn't choose a good old fashioned perfectly acceptable orange marmalade. Noooooooooo. I made grapefruit, orange, lemon AND lime marmalade. (Overcompensating much?)

The kink was the attempt to speed up this extremely boring boiling boiling boiling procedure. Look, I can hang out with a pot of stew bubbling away for days and days. But a pot of citrus? After the first half hour I feel like I've had inappropriate relations with those thingies people hang on the rearview mirror of the car. So I whipped out the presto and gave the citrus a lesson in hurry-the-fruit-up. Bottomline? Good marmalade, bad therapy. 

Re the therapy - I need my food to want me and need me and bubble my name frequently and wistfully. You can't hear your name being called above the whistle of a presto. And though the presto cut the time initially it messed up the whole pectin science - thereby requiring hours of boiling which led to hours of hallucinating about swinging cardboard trees.  And though that's more PG than most of the stuff I hallucinate about, it simply didn't cut it as far as cooking therapy was concerned.

Re the marmalade - Hey, it worked. Eventually. But I got nothing out of it. My clients did my neighbours did my friends did my family did and ironically one enemy did. But next time I make it I will soak up my therapy and let Miss Marmalady take her sweet, sweet, (cloyingly) sweet time.

GRAPEFRUIT, ORANGE, LEMON & LIME MARMALADE

4 Grapefruit
4 Oranges
3 Lemons
2 Limes

All of the above weighed 3kg. Aim for that weight. If you don't have it I like bitter so I'd knock out a grapefruit before I'd knock out an orange. But who cares. Knock out whatever. Bitter is always a bit weird but ironically people always think you're cool if you like weird.

I presto'd two batches of 1.5kg for 40 minutes from start to finish, each with 1.5l of water. Strain but keep liquid. Cool fruit then scoop out all the stuff inside. Chop the skins as thin as you want. Put back into the pot. Bundle all the gunk inside into muslin and put into the pot with the juices and the skins. Simmer till your biological clock stops ticking. If you lose hope, add lemon juice. If it still gives you grief, let it go man. It's bloody fruit.

xx
J