Christmas Presents in the making...

Life is very busy at the moment in the Crafternoon household!  I guess with two littlies, life is never going to be quiet (and come on, let's be honest- who want's a quite life?).  I am doing a little tutoring, a little child minding, and in amongst all of that, trying to be organised with Christmas gifts!

Al has been making lots of chutney.  I made several pots of Marmalade, and plan to get on with some jam and tomato sauce (great gifts for relatives who we don't necessarily see very often).  

E has been doing some Christmas stamping to help make labels for the said jams, marmalades and chutneys...

I am making good (but not speedy enough for my liking) progress on my Mum's cardi (though thankfully it is sleeveless, so I'm well over half way now.  Having said that, an hour of good old knitting time was spent today transforming that messy mound of wool into a nice neat ball (below).  I hate that about buying large balls of yarn- so often they are OK for the first little while, but then start falling apart and getting knotted.  This morning I was hanging out with my smallest one whilst the others were still asleep, and decided to bite the bullet and just unwind it and neatly ball it.

In other news, I had the pleasure today, of taking my son out for a Hot Chocolate- his treat for getting 20 stickers, and a really lovely opportunity to have some quality mother-son time.  I've been thinking a lot over recent days and weeks about how precious it is to make special memories.  This morning I was remembering how in the run up to Christmas, when my sister and I were at primary school, my Dad would take each of us out of school for a day (on our own) and do something really special.  I once had a day out in London, and remembering us going to the cinema and spilling pop corn everywhere!

What precious memories do you have?

C x

Dad's Marmalade.

I made some marmalade yesterday. And it worked- really well.  Hooray!  For Christmas my Grandparents gave me a preserving pan, and earlier on in the year I had a go at making some jam with some left over cherries we had.  But I used a recipe for plum jam, and just figured I'd adapt it.  NO. Bad idea.  It turns out you need extra pectin for cherry jam.  Suffice to say it was a disaster!

But, that was not the case with my marmalade.
My Mum has raved about some marmalade my Dad made recently (Dad is a bit of an amazing Jam maker, but does not use recipes!) so I called him up and asked him for his recipe, which he explained to me, with lots of additions here and there.

I started the process of making it, and then checked something on line, which was a bit of a mistake, as I then saw that all of the other recipes for marmalade had lots of water in them (4 odd pints!) whereas my Dad's recipe had none.  This seemed like quite a discrepancy, so I called and checked- was he really sure there was no water added?!  Nope.  Apparently no water!  So then I agonised.  Should I go with his recipe, and ignore all of the on-line wisdom, or should I just follow a recipe carefully?  I very nearly went with the latter, but then thought "It's pretty rude (not to mention pointless) to have called up someone, asked for their recipe, and then totally disregarded it!" so I went with Dad's recipe.  And it was amazing!

Here is the recipe:

1 kg Jam Sugar
1 kg Oranges and one lemon

Remove the zest from the oranges and lemon- either with a knife, and then slice the peel, or with a zester (I did the latter, as we have a zester which produces nice little slivers of peel!). Place peel into boiling water and boil for 5-10 mins to soften.  Strain and set aside.
Then remove the pith and disregard (when Dad said this I did find myself making the terrible joke "are you taking the pith?"- I know, I am so ashamed!).
Cut the remaining bits of oranges and lemon into chunks (I did quarters) and liquidise, and then pour the mixture into a sieve over a preserving pan, and push the pureed fruit into the pan.  Disregard the stringy bits that are left in the sieve*
Add the jam sugar to the orange juice/puree mix in the pan, as well as the bits of zest, and bring to the boil.  Once the boil is rolling (where the mixture is twice its original volume) keep it at that temperature for 4 minutes (It's super-fast to make- I think the jam-sugar massively speeds up the process, but I don't really know!)
After that, take it off the heat, and place a teaspoon full of it on a cold plate (I popped one in the freezer for 5 mins before hand).  Once it has cooled, it should be a good 'marmalade-y' texture... at this point I realise that I'm not sure what you should do if it isn't a good texture, as mine was...!
Pour/ladle the mixture into some pre-sterilized jam jars and allow to cool.
Voila. Wonderful marmalade!

*This was the only place I deviated from Dad's instructions- he put the big chunks of fruit into the pan and mashed them down with a potato masher, and then removed the chunks at the end after the boiling.  I just figured this way would be a bit neater!

This morning we enjoyed home-made marmalade on home-made bread for breakfast. Delicious!

The moral of my story? Trust Dad. Particularly when it comes to jam making!

Hope your weekend is lovely.

C x