Liven up your toast with whiskey and ginger marmalade!

We bought a fairly good supply of Seville oranges and I made one batch of marmalade which I told you about here. Dan took over for the second batch.

His method was different from mine. I took all the coloured peel off using a vegetable peeler and made sure I didn't get any of the white pith. The pith, along with the seeds, went into a cheesecloth bag and was suspended into the juice and peel.

The combination of peel, pith and seeds was supposed to provide enough natural pectin to thicken my marmalade. You may remember that I had to add some Cert-o to get it to thicken up.

Dan's recipe didn't divide the orange up in the same way. He squeezed out the juice, removed some of the thicker membrane and chopped the peel, pith and all.

That's a bottle of Jameson's Irish whiskey. He wasn't drinking it. It was waiting to be part of the recipe — whiskey and candied ginger.

His required quite a lengthy period of boiling. It was different from mine, even at this stage.

As I had, he cooked and cooked, stirred and stirred, tested and tested. He used the small-cold-plate-in-the-freezer method as well but the marmalade still wasn't thickening. We even found a candy thermometer that we hadn't seen for years in the bottom of the "miscellaneous drawer" and he used that to cook to what should have been the right temperature for it to thicken. No luck though.

In the end, he resorted to the same solution I had: hello, Cert-o. He stirred in a bit and presto — a lovely thick preserve. He added the whiskey and the ginger and pretty soon, it was ready for the bottles.

His recipe made a little more than mine and there was a bit left over to use as a tester. It's very delicious. Marmalade, by its very nature and by definition, is tart and bitter but this one is even moreso. The oranges make it tart; the whiskey and the ginger make it sharp and bitter.

It sure can liven up a piece of toast.

The morning after makes it all worthwhile

I could just leave it at that — a photo of a bottle of marmalade, gleaming in the sun, the finished product of a satisfying kitchen task.

It would send the wrong message though. Making marmalade is a big, time-consuming job, hardly worth doing if it wasn't so delicious spread on your toast the morning after.

Marmalade is made with Seville oranges which aren't always readily available. There's usually a fairly short window of opportunity for snagging them and sometimes, it involves stalking the stores so you don't miss them if it happens to be a small shipment. Dan found them this year at Pete's Frootique, the lovely market in downtown Halifax (also in Bedford) where you can often find unique and unusual fruits and vegetables.

Seville oranges have tough, usually quite nubbly, thick skin and they're chock-full of seeds. They're bitter. They look like other oranges but they're not.

Marmalade is bitter by nature but even still, you don't want the bitterness of pith. I use a vegetable peeler to strip the orange zest — and the zest of one lemon. Try to get as little of the white as possible

After the peeling comes the juicing. You'll be struck when you open a Seville orange by how ugly it is. All seeds and membrane and unpleasant colour. In spite of that, there's lots of juice. You strain the juice through a sieve to catch all the seeds and pulp and then you pull out all the membranes and put them with seeds and pulp in a square of cheesecloth and make a little bag.

The bag goes into the pot of juice with the chopped peel. The seeds, membranes and pulp contain a lot of the natural pectin and that's what will thicken your marmalade.

You have to boil this until the peel becomes squishy; meanwhile, you're pressing on the cheesecloth to get as much pectin out of that stuff as possible. You'll know when it's time to add your sugar and begin the serious cooking.

I did everything right (pretty sure) but in spite of my best efforts, the mixture didn't gel. I tried the trick (at Dan's gentle suggestion) of putting the small plate in the freezer, then dropping some of the hot mixture on its coldness to see what would happen. As the cooking progressed, the mixture seemed to get a little thicker but when I poured some into a prepared bottle, it was way too liquid.

I was still cooking and stirring, way after midnight.

Finally, running out of time and energy and with no one around to sit in judgment, I went to the pickling and preserving drawer and found a small box of Cert-o with a package inside that had only been partly used. I felt vindicated because once I had done it, it wasn't as if I'd used a whole box of Cert-o. I used only a small part of a package! I stirred it in and within minutes, I was — with some relief — filling my bottles.

And here they are:

They're quite different from the last batch I made, in 2014. This year's batch is darker. Maybe the oranges were different; maybe the longer cooking time darkened the sugar; maybe the sugar itself — an organic unrefined sugar which is a little darker than the usual refined sugar — made the difference.

It's lovely though. There was a little bowl left as a taster. . .

. . .and I had it on my toast this morning.

Very good. I'm giving it a passing grade.

A peachy way to spend the day

We moved into this house 17 years ago. (I’ve now lived here longer – much longer – than I’ve lived anywhere else in my life.)

It was September when we arrived and we looked out into the backyard and there was a peach tree – a fully-loaded peach tree. I had no idea such a thing could thrive in downtown Halifax but there it was.

We had to settle in to our new home but – as we’ve learned since, every Fall – when peaches are ready to be picked, you’ve gotta pick them.

That year, our first experience as peach-tree-owners, we picked – this is the truth – 30 dozen peaches. We had bowls and basins overflowing with them.

They were delicious and we ate lots of them but it soon became obvious that we’d have to start processing and preserving. Thus began our long and ongoing relationship with the peach and all its many possibilities.

When I came downstairs this morning, Dan was quite far along in extracting juice to make peach jelly. We made it for the first time last year and I think we’ll now happily add it to our all-time list.

A few days ago, Dan had already made peach conserve, a delicious preserve that includes, besides peaches, chopped oranges with peel, almonds, candied ginger and spices. We’ve made conserve before and it’s always a favourite.

Over the years, we’ve also made a variety of peach jams, chutney and spiced whole peaches. The chutney is delectable and I often serve it at Thanksgiving and Christmas, with the turkey dinner. Of course, we also serve it with curries and it goes nicely with the tourtière on Christmas Eve.

The demise of our peach tree is predicted every year – it’s pretty old for a fruit tree, apparently – but it’s still going strong. It has good years and other not-so-good years although I don’t think we’ve ever missed a year of preserving. It’s just that some years we do more than others.

So we’ll continue to give it tender loving care; we’ll prune it when necessary and prop it up with the step ladder when its branches get too heavy to hold themselves up. We’ll try to keep the clothes on the line from catching on the branches and we’ll fertilize responsibly.

We’ll do our best for the peach tree and after all this time, we’ll surely go into mourning when its fruitfulness comes to an end.