Not to brag, but the fruit tree varieties at this property are very underwhelming.
This post is part of
Harvest Monday at
Our Happy Acres. We finally got a week of winter here so my garden had a rest while I dealt with the 50lbs of kumquats that even the critters aren't interested in eating.
My first marmalade attempt a few weeks ago was both visually disgusting and texturally repulsive. (Shout out to NYT Cooking for leaving a gap in their paywall so I could access their
article on making jam. It was very helpful when I was sending SOS messages into my google search bar.)
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| Not for human consumption. |
The second time around I made some adjustments - like if you smell sugar caramelizing it's a sign that you've cooked it for five minutes too long, not a sign that you need to cook it for 20 more minutes.
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| Better. |
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| Acceptable for humans to eat. |
I used
this recipe as a rough template and then used a hot water bath at the end. I also threw in a few Criolla Sella peppers. They have an extremely disappointing taste (I got them in a seed swap from someone who had never grown them) but have a fruity, tropical smell that I was into at the moment.
The oranges are sweet, but have poor eating quality, so those were squeezed into yard juice and also sliced really thin for a breakfast salad made with Renee's mesclun mix.
The grapefruit tree produces fruit that smell better than they taste, but it's become an integral component of my Old Fashioned recipe that I originally ripped off from a fantastic bar in Silver Lake and have been perfecting over the years. I sliced them and threw them in the oven on a wire rack for 10-12 hours.
