Bread and marmalade

I? Am having such a nice morning. Karen's sleeping in, as she does of a weekend; I've forgotten how, so I am pootling about in the kitchen, largely. I'm trying to reactivate my old sourdough starter, from its state of somnolent sludge; and I'm making the first batch of marmalade. It's all experimental: this is the same method that I evolved at home, that produced the jars that K likes so much; but I am regarding these American Sevilles with a jaundiced eye. There seem to be precious few pips in them, and the pips - as we know, Bob - are where the pectin lurks. I am wondering if they've been bred out, by the pectin-additive industry. We'll see. If I don't achieve a set, I guess pectin can be added. But I'd really rather not.

Fretful suspicions aside, this is just such fun. M'friend Jaym deprecates marmalade-making because it's so much work, but m'friend Jaym is mistaken; this is the kind of work I really enjoy. I have fifty-six oranges here, in sixteen pounds of fruit, so I'm making two batches. I've never worked with these quantities before. But I scoop and chop a few oranges, and stir the vat, and knead the bread, and wander through here to poke at the internets, and go back to chop some more, and it is all just delightful. Also, the sun is shining. For practically the first time since I arrived a week ago. It rained again overnight, but now it's all bright out there. It can do that as often as it likes, for all of me.

The good is oft interred in their jars

(some hours later)

And lo, eight pounds of oranges and eight pounds of sugar and I don't know how much water have been converted into ten pints of chunky Seville marmalade. It always takes longer than I think to boil it down to the setting point (but this is mostly because my process involves covering the whole oranges with water and boiling them for an hour the day before then leaving them to steep overnight, which always involves more water than you'd think, so that has to get boiled off again), so when Mark came for lunch* we all had to hang around for an extra hour before we headed off to the restaurant. And on a lazy Sunday, too. Hey-ho, the terrible life we lead...

I didn't take any photos of the seething vat, but here are some of the jars newly filled:



And here are all the jars lined up pretty:



In other news, I really, really need a jam funnel. *is a messy pourer*


*Mark lives maybe ten miles from my house in Newcastle, and is married to one of my oldest friends. And is currently in Sunnyvale for work. If we didn't have the word "coincidence", somebody would just have to invent it.

The day's harvest

Actually, I'm moderately pleased with myself. I have made a batch of fair marmalade, and successfully revivified my sourdough starter, and behold:



(Also I made watercress pesto pasta and a green salad for supper, and it was very nice indeed.)

(Oh, and I finished scraping off the last of the stickers and gave my desk a first thorough oiling. Which it slurped up and asked for more, which it shall have.)