The making of MARMALADE - kidstyle.

I have only ever made marmalade once in my culinary life, and it ended with me having to call a plumber because the residue from my rinsed out pans left such a thick goop in the drain, it needed a professional to unblock it! So, you can imagine my reservations when the lad asked me what he could cook with grapefruit? Should I suggest marmalade or pretend he never asked me? We have a lovely elderly neighbour, who has a very robust grapefruit tree growing in her backyard. Every year she gives it a very severe pruning in an attempt to keep it under control. It doesn't work as every year it comes back bushier than the last with big, yellow, fat grapefruit on it. She planted the tree around 30 years ago and has enjoyed many fruit over the years. Unfortunately she can no longer see the pips to eat them properly which is a travesty, but she is happy for others to enjoy the fruit and is very generous in sharing them. So, every year, we pick some fruit and juice them. I love grapefruit juice, and so does my husband, but the kids like the juicing process more than the flavour. However, this year, I decided to move forward from my less than positive experience last time, and get the kids involved in a batch of grapefruit marmalade..kid style! The first step was the planning. I had an old recipe, but thought I should try to find a more simple one on the internet that would suit the age group and skills of my "helpers". At 5 and 7 years, they are sometimes more hindrance than help, but I really want to encourage them to think about food and the processes it takes to get food on the table (or in this case, into a jar!). Both kids were GUNG-HO about picking the grapefruit so it was hard to hold them back and talk about recipes and what we should do. After my initial search, I found a great simple recipe on the Cooking Cache website. All I needed was 3 medium grapefruit, 2 medium lemons, 10 cups water and 10 cups of sugar. EEK! 10 cups of sugar!??? This in itself amazed the children, no wonder they love jams but neither of them had tried marmalade before so they were expecting something sweet and sticky after seeing how much sugar went in. It was a great surprise to them when they tasted the result (and highly entertaining for me to watch) to find it was still sour enough to make them squint. I guess they didn't think about the fact that if the fruit is sour, then the end result will be sour too? Funny. OK, so it was time to gather our baskets and visit Phyl to get permission to pick the fruit. She was tickled pink that we still wanted them, and she was also really pleased they weren't going to waste, not to mention that she would get some home made marmalade for her toast at the end of it all! She has always loved it and knew we would come through with a jar or two. What fun we had, picking the best fruit, trying to reach it, twisting it until it came off, and comparing the sizes we all had. When you considered some were the size of a baby's head, no wonder the kids had trouble balancing them while reaching high. It was like a comedy act, watching them drop, juggle and struggle with them, while straining to see the green bug we found on a leaf! So easily distracted. Back to the house to scrub the fruit. This is always important, but more so since we had recently had the worst dust storm since the 1930's! We set up the sink with water and scrubbing brushes. Both kids put to hard labour to get them squeaky clean. Then there was a squabble over who got the biggest knife to cut the fruit. We had to have our safety discussion at this point, because even though both children take the use of knives very seriously, there is always the danger of severed limbs, and that would certainly have interrupted the proceedings somewhat. I was so tempted to go over the slices and re-cut them to make them thinner, but thought that this is the kids marmalade after all and they should be able to feel proud of the fact that they did most of it themselves, so CHUNKY style marmalade it was to be. We got our biggest saucepan out and put the slices of fruit in. The first born was in charge of adding the water cup by cup. The lad was the fruit man. Everyone had an important job to do. Once that was done, we left the fruit overnight to soak. Because I work 3 days a week, this had to be timed on a day I knew I could boil the fruit the following morning. With all of the extra curricular activities, this was a feat in itself, but we managed. The next morning I packed the firstborn off to school, and the lad and I hurried home to begin the next step of our little project. We boiled the fruit with the lid on for about 45 minutes (until rind is soft). Then we measured the mixture, cup by cup. This is important as the usual idea is to mix 1 cup of suger per each cup of fruit mixture. We had 10, so the lad began the filling, tipping and counting of the sugar cups and made a pretty good mess of the kitchen floor in the process. Theres nothing quite like standing in a dust of sugar, crunching and sticking with each step while trying to concentrate on BOILING hot liquid! I guess that's what cooking kid-style is all about (!?). We stirred it over the heat, without boiling, until the sugar was dissoved. Then we brought it to the boil, uncovered, without stirring for about 15 minutes (or until marmalade gels when tested. I'm not sure what happened here, but mine took much longer to gel. I'm thinking that the removing of the seeds (even though the recipe said to earlier in the process) left me without enough pectin? Who knows, but we boiled for longer. There is a few ways to test the gel point of jams, we used the cold plate method. I find it all a bit open-ended, so I've recently bought a new thermometer from Victoria's basement to help me on my next quest. This takes the worry out of the process. We had washed and steralized the jars after we hurriedly did a ring around of the neighbours and friends to GATHER them. Once the lad gets an idea in his head, we have to put it into action pronto so, the call went out, and in no time we had an interesting assortment of jars for our marmalade. We put them in the oven just before it was time to jar up, and we had just enough for the amount of mixture. I did this part as the mixture is SCALDINGLY hot, so there was no way I was letting the lad near the pan. I'm currently sporting a scald on my arm from my tea kettle, so I can't even be trusted with hot things about. He loved watching it gloop into the jars, and we let them cool before wiping them down. Once the first born arrived home from school, we made some labels and lid covers and had fun deciding who would be worthy recipients of our marvellous marmalade. After the official tasting (and the decision that they loved making it but don't like the taste), we farmed jars off to our generous neighbour, one jar went to pre-school for the kids to taste, to the school teacher, to Ya Ya (who promptly marinated chicken wings in it and said they were scrupmtious!), to our friends and family. It was a great experience, and one well worth doing. The kids both learned a bit more about food and the sugar content, and I got some ripper, flavoursome marmalade for my morning toast! Happy days. Happi eating!