Orange Marmalade

Bampy and Mammy and my parents wedding.

It's funny the things you remember about a person - little things that seem insignificant - but can sure
brighten your day once that loved one is gone. I remember tons of little insignificant things about my grandmother, whom we all called Mammy. Probably because I spent so much time with her as a child. Today I remember her love of orange marmalade. She didn't always have it around the house. In fact, I remember a jar of apple butter on the counter much more so than the bright orange jar of marmalade. But I do remember on those occasions when she did have some, how she would go on an on about how much she loved it.

For Christmas, like every Christmas, my Daddy always gives us bags of apples, oranges, grapefruit, nuts etc. Well this year he came with two boxes (huge boxes) of fruit. One box was half red delicious apples and half golden delicious and the other box three quarters filled with oranges. Now, my family loves fruit, but even for us, that's a lot of fruit to eat before it goes bad. And once again, in remembrance of my Mammy, I couldn't let any of it go to waste. I sliced and dried most of the apples and today I will imagine my Mammy in the kitchen with me, as I, for the first time ever, will be making orange marmalade. I have looked to my favorite canning website, Simply Canning, and a few of my canning books/magazines and many of those recipes don't use pectin, and instead just use sugar and the frozen spoon method - which always makes me a bit nervous. So I decided to use the recipe in the first link that you can also find packed inside the box of pectin. The recipe only calls for 4 oranges and I have somewhere close to 20. I think I have two boxes of pectin in the cabinet left over from this summer's canning season so that means I will only be using eight of my bulk oranges. The rest we can eat on and who knows, I may go ahead and try the frozen spoon method after all.