Ireland day 0464. Thursday 05 January 2023- Marmalade1 *

Ireland day 0464. Thursday 05 January 2023- Marmalade1

Today’s summary	Val had a day off the Museum and so we we were both in the flat today. I made some marmalade with my new scissors. it turned out OK but a bit cloudy. Will taste and report back
Today’s weather	Heavy rain on and off for much of the day. Overcast and no sun. Moderate south westerly wind. Appx 10C

Today’s overview location (The blue mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The green line shows where we walked) (No GPX today)

Commentary

(Summary blog only. Last full blog was Day 0368).

Spent the day in the flat fighting off the remnants of my pre-Christmas cold (which seems to have degenerated into a chesty cough now). Ugh.

Val had a day off the museum, and has finished at Wonderlights now, so it was nice to have a quiet day together in the same place.

I took the opportunity of a relative lull in proceedings to make the first batch of marmalade – 1kg of the fruit I bought yesterday was transformed into 6 jars of orange nectar. The process worked quite well and the multi-bladed scissors seemed to work effectively for cutting the peel. But the finished product was a bit cloudy and I’m not quite sure why. I will try again with another batch tomorrow and see if I get better results. Perhaps I boiled it too long today? Will try out a sample on some toast later – hopefully it will taste ok.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Squeezing the fruit – the Sevilles from Evergreen were excellent – very juicy	End result of multi-bladed scissoring

Boiling the peel. I didn’t have any muslin cloth to wrap the pith and seeds in, so I used a linen tea-towel instead. Possibly it was too porous, leading to cloudiness?	Time-honoured test for a set. It actually reached setting point quicker than I expected so I think I might have slightly over-boiled it. Another possible contributing fact to the cloudiness

This is what it is supposed to look like, according to Delia Smith

Multi-bladed scissors in action. Quite effective but slightly squashed the pith in the process – possibly leading to cloudiness? I am clutching at straws here.