If you don’t know already, Scott and I welcomed our first baby, Maxine Gean, into the world on February 17th! I will do a post devoted to just her very soon – probably next week – because this post is not about her (as cute FREAKING ADORABLE as she is), it’s about orange marmalade.
Scott and I discovered at our gender reveal party in September that the big, ugly green bush in the corner of our yard was in fact NOT an oversized twig dressed in a poorly made Hackberry bush costume but in fact, an ORANGE tree! Imagine our surprise when we saw fruit coming forth from this behemoth of a bush!
We knew that orange season was in the winter, so we waited until January before we plucked the first bright orange fruit from the tree. Scott brought it inside and placed it on our newly-finished kitchen island counter and proceeded to slice and bite into the juiciest, sweetest so-sour-it-made-your-face-turn-inside-out orange – YIKES! So bitter, so sour. Was this “orange” in fact a lemon in an orange costume..?? Why was our fruit tree playing dress up??
So we waited another month and tried again – still sour and awful. We were about to give up on our orange crop all together and cut down this tree after all. That is, until my mom came to stay with us while we waited for our daughter to arrive and said, “You guys should just make marmalade out of these!” You’re SO right mom! Adding copious amounts of sugar to anything will make it sweet, right?!
Right, we were. 20 oranges and 40 cups (yes, FORTY) of sugar later and we made (okay, so my mom made – I mostly watched, nursed my new infant, slept, and played around with my calligraphy staff and ink well) ourselves this sticky, amber-colored, mostly sweet but slightly tangy orange marmalade courtesy of Ina Garten’s recipe. The only thing we changed about this recipe is we omitted the lemons – our oranges were sour enough! I encourage you to try this out for yourself! Or come over and grab a jar – we have 36 of them, after all.
Sweet and sour,
HK