In the kitchen

After an excessive canning hiatus, I got to work this weekend on 2 recipes from The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook.

1: Grapefruit marmalade. The bag of grapefruit I got from the farmers' market was only 4 pounds, so I made up the extra pound with some oranges. And I point-blank refuse to have as much sugar as fruit in a jam, even a marmalade, so I cut down the sugar to 3 pounds. AND (Lord I hate people who modify recipes the first time they make them, but on va faire comment) I cooked them jam in 2 batches b/c the whole quantity only barely fit in my pot. So the second batch I flavoured w/ some leftover New Orleans rum in which I steeped some lavender flowers. By the end of the cooking process, I was pretty sure I never wanted to see any citrus fruit ever again, so I will have to report back on results later.

2: Page Mandarin Marmalade. (Sorry, can't find it online.) Using satsumas for the mandarins and might use some ancient Meyer lemons for the lemon juice and will probably cut down some on the sugar and will flavour the second batch with either a habanero or some of the Liberian pepper powder, but otherwise (ha) not deviating from the instructions. (It's a 3-day recipe so I'll be finishing it tonight.)

I made king cake following a John Besh recipe and was kind of disappointed; it's a perfectly nice mildly sweet bread, quite pulla-esque, but hardly the yeasty, spicy, rich deliciousness I imagined. A possible redeeming variation would be filling it with jam - next time. The frosting at least was a success - my first go at 7-minute icing, which I love for the taste (marshmallow/meringue!) and for the elegance of its construction - cooking beaten egg whites with hot sugar syrup, how clever. I wonder if a caramel version would be feasible?

(Saturday night involved a bicycle wipeout that left me w/ road rash on my stomach and the lower parts of my palms pretty much out of commission, so it is possible that my cooking on Sunday was not really up to par; yes I was not entirely sober, but most of the blame lies w/ De Soto's total lack of streetlights and one particularly vicious pothole.)