Mountains of marmalade

I had intended to work more on Autumn Splendor today – getting the leaves hashed out and starting work on the sleeve linings – but got sidetracked into kitchen projects instead.  I have, as you know, been candying various citrus peels (Seville orange, Meyer lemon, and bergamot to be exact) over the last several weeks, and they were finally ready to go into jars.  At the same time, I had been planning to make lemon marmalade for several weeks, from the bounty of our young Meyer lemon tree.  It has been generously festooned for some months now with lots of little lemons about two inches long by one inch across.  Not ideal for juicing, but perfect for marmalade! since small fruits have a higher ratio of peel to pulp.

So I decided to harvest most of the lemons and make marmalade, in addition to putting the candied citrus into jars.  I figured it would take me a couple of hours to chop up, boil and can everything…

…six hours later, I now have twenty-seven pint  jars full of citrus!  Six each of candied Seville orange peel and Meyer lemon peel, four of candied bergamot peel, and eleven(!) of Meyer lemon marmalade.    That is almost a gallon and a half of marmalade.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do with that much marmalade – give the excess to friends and family, I imagine – but it is delicious.

(My favorite culinary trick: mix Meyer lemon marmalade with some soy sauce and use as a sauce over duck.  Sounds really bizarre, but it works – the lemon marmalade is tarter and bitterer than the traditional orange sauce, which cuts the sweetness dramatically.  And of course the Meyer lemon is a cross between an orange and a lemon, so has a wonderful tart fruitiness.)

And now I’m thoroughly exhausted.  We had a wonderful time at La Fondue last night, but we didn’t get home until nearly midnight, which is three hours after my usual bedtime.  And unfortunately, I wake up at the same hour every morning regardless of when I went to bed the night before…so I got very little sleep.  Time to go crash!  Tomorrow I will work more on the sleeve linings.