Spring cleaning

I said a couple of weeks ago that spring has sprung. Well I guess I was a bit premature as we have just had a week of grey skies, intermittent rain, and it is very cold! That said, there have been short flashes of blue sky and it is forecast clear for Saturday, and I can still see the almond blossom from my craft-room window, so all is not bad.

All this inspired me to do some early spring cleaning, to the extent that I now have a sparklingly clean and well organised fridge freezer, and today I tackled the larder. Over Christmas it had got incredibly muddled, with lots of extra bits and pieces put in the wrong places, and this week I knocked the lid off my box of oats as I got it out to make my morning porridge, and although I didn't think many had spilled out, I heard a few trickle down behind the shelves and I knew I needed to clear it all up, as all the cereals, pulses etc are ideal places for unwanted beasties to lay their eggs!

So, starting at the top, I cleared each shelf at a time and sorted everything out. With very little cupboard space in the actual kitchen, I rely on the larder to store my larger pyrex items, baking equipment and pans, as well as food and drink, so every shelf is filled to capacity and when I do buy extra items such as Christmas goodies, there is no obvious place to store them, and they tend to get shoved in anywhere so that everything gets a bit precarious. Today I got rid of a lot of packages by topping up my containers, and I found a few new ones, now filled and labelled too. I have moved a few of the largest pans, (which I haven't used since I got here but I just might need them one day!) into the garage store cupboard, and surprisingly I found a home for everything else. I even pulled out all the baking pans from under the lowest shelves and had a good clean out, and I found oats everywhere!! Apart from two opened packets of cereal which will be used up next week, there is now nothing that isn't safely stored in its own little box. Doesn't it look nice? I wish it would stay that way, but with the best will in the world, I just know I will need to do it all again in a few months time.

This second picture is the end wall, not visible from the kitchen. There is an amazing stock of bottled beer, left from our last lot of visitors back in the autumn! Chris rarely drinks much at home, and when he does, it is usually red wine, and although I often drink clara (shandy) when we go out, it doesn't occur to me to make it at home. I'd rather have a nice English cuppa any day. Unfortunately, a rather large area is taken up with my fruit bowl, which always used to live on the kitchen table. But now I have a fruit eating cat! I have never known a cat to really like fruit before, but Baggins, my grey persian, was raiding the fruit bowl every time my back was turned. He ate his way through a bunch of grapes, several plums, a few bananas, and left teeth marks in just about everything else. It didn't seem to do him any harm though I'm not sure he should be eating it, but more to the point, I bought it for us to eat! So now it has to live in the larder where the cats can't get at it.

I'm busy tomorrow, but maybe on Saturday I will tackle the little upright freezer. I'd quite like to be able to open the door without a cascade of frozen meat parcels landing on me!

Forty pounds of bottled sunshine!

Bottled sunshine? Well marmalade really, but just to look at it and smell it, makes you think of sunny orange groves.

I told you last week that I made some grapefruit marmalade and I was waiting for my friendly market-stall holder to find me some bitter oranges. Well I didn't have to wait that long. On Wednesday, Pam (the lady who is teaching me to make lace), arrived at our craft group with bags of seville oranges. She has a spanish friend who regularly picks whatever is on his tree for her, because she has a permanent table at her local bar to sell jams and other craft items to raise money for Asprodalba, which is a day centre, and a small residential unit, for handicapped youngsters. He asked her if she wanted them again this year and said he thought he had about 40kg of fruit on his tree. She went shopping, and when she got back the oranges had arrived outside her flat, but she said it was nearer to 250 kilos, and she didn't know what to do with them all!

There weren't very many takers so I came home with two bags full and it turned out to be about twelve pounds of fruit. (I make marmalade in my pressure cooker, and being a rather ancient model, all its recipes are still in pounds and ounces, so that's how I weighed them!). That meant I could make four batches of my recipe. I decided it would save time if I made two double batches so I prepared the six pounds of fruit, but when I added all the sugar it came right up to the rim of my preserving pan. Not only was this very difficult to stir, it could have been rather disasterous when it came to the boil. So I stirred it very gently until all the sugar had dissolved and then used a big jug to decant about a third of it back into the pressure cooker. It's the only other large pan I have now. The two lots then boiled away quite happily, and when they both reached setting point, I put them all back into the preserving pan for a quick stir to make sure the peel was evenly distributed. This made just over twenty pounds of marmalade. So then I did one more batch as I like it, with lots of peel but finely sliced. Then with the last lot of oranges I cut it into thicker chunks, and replaced a third of the sugar with dark brown. One of my potential customers at church has aasked me about making a darker, thick cut version, so I looked on the internet for some suggestions. Now, hopefully, I will be able to sell it.

Of course I don't need anywhere near forty pounds of it for our use, but I will take it to church through the year for our fund-raising table, and may also be able to sell some in the local bar for our own village charity, Asadis, which helps disadvantaged children within the village.

Knowing my luck, my good friend Josefina will have bags of bitter oranges at the market for me this week, which I will have to accept, and as I hate waste, I shall also have to make marmalade with them. It's a good thing I made all those mince pies. At least I have a ready supply of mincemeat jars to hand, though it is somewhat depleted now.