Lady Marmalade

The five-hour, start-to-finish marmalade project begins by peeling three pounds of oranges. I used half red oranges and half navels.

You then boil the peels twice, to reduce the bitter taste and make them easier to scrape and slice.

A pile of pith. Hah! I crack myself up!

The fruit, ready to cook.

Thinly sliced orange peel. It doesn't take as long as you would think, because the peel is very soft. And the knife is very sharp.

And we're cooking.

And cooking, and cooking, and cooking. It takes a long time for this much fruit and peel to reach 220°.

The final product – a very bad photo, indeed. But very tasty marmalade!

The marmalade-making project was both successful and disappointing. Successful in that I used a new recipe in which the peels are first boiled and then sliced, cutting the slicing time and effort significantly.

Disappointing in that I cooked the mixture too long, thus reducing the amount of product. And the product is, um, thick. Very thick. Like, we have to nuke it for a half a minute in order to spread it.

I noticed that the fruit stand down the road has a new shipment of Florida oranges. I may be making two batches of marmalade this year.

Before I publish this, I had planned to post this today ever since I finished the project, not knowing, of course, what horrific events would transpire over the weekend.

I am heartsick about the shooting in Arizona. I realize that the young man who is responsible for the actual shooting is unstable. But I agree with Pima County Sheriff Dupnik that the rhetoric spewing from right-wing talk radio and "some television stations" fuels the fire, as do politicians who choose to use verbiage that might incite the unstable among us to arm themselves and then commit violence.

What have we come to, here in America, when a nine-year-old girl who just wants to meet her Congressional representative is randomly killed in an attack on democracy? When a federal judge – by all accounts a fair and honest man – is taken from his family and community for no reason we know of, so far? When a bright, caring, committed Congresswoman is inflicted with life-threatening trauma and an uncertain recovery? And the others … I have no words, but these:

What have we come to?

Darkness cannot drive out darkness;

only light can do that.

Hate cannot drive out hate;

only love can do that.

Martin Luther King, Jr.