Orange Marmelade

Our friends Tae and Dan are leaving for Korea right about now (Dan's on a post-doc and Tae found a pretty sweet job there), so, having missed their wedding reception (being out of town), we met them and our friend Piper for drinks at the Muddy Pig, a fabulous place for Belgian ales and conversation. Anyway, since they were in the same, we're-leaving-the-country-so-we-have-to-get-rid-of-everything-we're-not-bringing-with scramble (that we ourselves still remember quite vividly from almost five years ago now) they brought along a trunk's full of produce, beer and wine to give us. Now, normal people (and I mean that in an admiring kind of way), would, in response to being given a bag of oranges as part of this bounty, say to themselves, "Wow, oranges. Let's eat some of those." or possibly "Wow, oranges. I guess we could juice these." or even "Wow, oranges. Let's use the zest in some recipes and then eat the fruit, or whatever." But we had been talking about making marmalade in the general "We should maybe try that sometime" kind of way for some time now, and if we were actually going to do it, well this was as good a time as any.

We used the zest including version of this recipe, more or less, and, yes, it is as messy and labor intensive as it looks. Oranges don't zest as easily as lemons or limes do, but we knew that it is in fact the pith (the spongey white part) not the zest (the colorful peel part) that causes bitternes, so we knew that we wanted to include the zest. Luckily our friend peeler monkey was there to help and made the job go by much faster. Two or three hours later we had produced this fine jam, that we have since pronounced tasty on pancakes, scones and toast.