Oranges and Lemons

Nearly everywhere you go in Portugal you will see orange and lemon trees on parcels of land, overhanging walls and lining roads. Often the fruit fallen to the ground unpicked, unwanted, a surfeit of citrus. We hardly saw a property without mature orange or lemon tree(s) when we were looking for a house. Well until we bought our home which had only a couple of young citrus trees - read sticks - on the property. We do have other fruit trees however which are very productive..   

​Our neighbor has a beautiful orange grove and kindly gifted a couple of buckets full, way too many to eat though they are sweet, juicy and seedless! So what does a girl do with all those oranges? You bottle sunshine for the winter months, you make marmalade.

In fact I made three different types of marmalade. As they were sweet and not the Seville oranges preferred for the purpose I added some lemons. I used two different methods of preparing the fruit. The first method boils whole fruit to soften skins then chopping before the sugar stage. I used this method for my orange & lemon batch, just fruit and white sugar.

The other method where you juice the fruit, shred peel then boil to soften skins before adding sugar I used for the next two batches. The second recipe again used white sugar but I added fresh shredded ginger root and star anise to the fruit. My third recipe I mixed demerara and white sugar and added Jameson Irish Whiskey.

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So a three day marathon in the kitchen and about thirty jars of marmalade later I think I'm all marmaladed out.

Should give me time to recover for the soft fruit season. We have  apricot and greengage trees that gave an abundant harvest our first year here, not so good the second. Lots of apricot jam and I'd like to can some as I canned peaches and cherries from our trees in Michigan. Greengage makes fabulous chutney to have with curry as well as jam. 
All I need is some ideas what to do with the proliferation of kiwis from the vine here!