Calamansi marmalade

Recently, a coworker brought in a bounty of calamansi for the library staff.  These are small but incredibly juicy citrus fruits, and you can eat the peel and everything.  By the end of the second day that these were available on the break room tables, I had amassed 4 sandwich-sized Ziploc bags full of calamansi.  Everyone else who had wanted some had claimed theirs, and hey, I didn't want these to go to waste.

I took this photo AFTER I had taken out what I needed for the marmalade.  It's a 2.5-qt Pyrex bowl full of citrus!

Citrus comparison: that's a regular lime on the left and a calamansi fruit on the right.  Sort of Key lime-sized.

Of course, the next step for us was to figure out what, exactly, to do with all this citrus; we couldn't possibly make enough salad dressing before the end of their shelf life.  Dom did a little research and found that one could make calamansi marmalade.  Not being a fan of orange marmalade, I didn't think much of this, but after remembering that I really like another citrus marmalade (yuzu), and discovering that these marmalade recipes only needed citrus, sugar, and water, I figured we should try it.  I ended up using this recipe that yielded a manageable result: 1 jar, rather than something like 12 jars.

Our notes:

• I figured this recipe wouldn't take much active time, but I hadn't counted on having to seed, juice, and slice 15 citrus fruits that averaged about 1" diameter.  That took a while right there, but the rest of it was pretty hands-off: boil the fruits, juice, and water together; put it in the fridge overnight; and then boil it with sugar the following day.  The actual cooking part could not have been easier.
• I cut each fruit in half along its equator and then extracted the seeds.  Then I'd cut each half in half longitudinally, then slice those quarters.  Basically, this produced smaller segments of peel, which I thought would be nicer in the final product than long-ish ribbons of peel.  This also made the slicing part easier; the quarters were easier to slice than the halves, somehow.
• The recipe calls for ¾ cup of sugar, and even more if one has a sweet tooth.  You know us: we used a little less than ½ cup, and the marmalade came out delicious.
• For the second boiling (with the sugar), I thought the mixture was having issues jelling, as I simmered it for longer than the 15-20 minutes called for, and I wondered if this had to do with drastically reducing the sugar as I tend to do.  But after I'd put the finished marmalade in the fridge, it started to set.  Success!
• The original recipe was written with canning in mind; not having any equipment for this, we had just planned to use the marmalade within a few days of making it.  If we make a larger batch, my plan is to put the fresh marmalade into our silicone muffin pan, put that in the freezer, and then wrap each 'muffin' of marmalade to store in the freezer and defrost as needed.  That way I won't tie up all of our 1-cup Pyrex containers at one time!

The marmalade is delicious on yogurt.

This result has caused us to idly wonder where calamansi has been all our lives.

Writeup background music: The Beatles, Help! (1965); we just watched the movie and were pleasantly surprised at how entertaining it was.  The trick for me was to make absolutely no comparisons with A Hard Day's Night, which is one of my favorites.

Cranberry haupia

At Costco recently they had fresh cranberries on sale for some ridiculously low price, somehow about as low as when we'd buy them back when we lived in a cranberry-producing region.  So of course I had to get some.  I planned to just do my regular cranberry sauce (courtesy of Joy of cooking), but when I saw this recipe for cranberry haupia in the newspaper, I knew we had to try it.

Ingredients for the haupia layer were:

1 13.5-oz. can coconut milk

½ c. sugar

2 envelopes unflavored gelatin

½ c. water

1 c. milk

We had coconut cream, but not coconut milk, so we used what we had.  It probably made for a richer haupia anyway!  And like usual, we used less sugar--probably about 1/3 c. or so.

Ingredients for the cranberry layer included:

2 c. fresh or frozen cranberries

¼ c. sugar, or more to taste

1 tsp. cinnamon

½ c. red wine

½ c. canned crushed pineapple

We omitted the pineapple because I wanted the cranberry flavor to come through, not cranberry-pineapple, and for a change, we used about the same amount of sugar as called for in the recipe.

Obviously, neither of us went to Stanford, but it was nice to get their wine gratis.

We used a Malbec that we'd gotten for free.  Upon tasting a bit of the wine after opening the bottle, we realized that neither of us actually likes Malbec (too dry and tannic), but we figured we'd use it anyway, because what else were we going to do with it?  In the end, it turned out that we couldn't really taste the wine in the finished sauce, so we probably could have used just about any red and the cranberries would have turned out fine.

The haupia layer was already solid at this point, so we took especial care to let the cranberry part cool to room temperature so as not to undermine our hard work!

Like being at a Thanksgiving or a Christmas luau, right?

The recipe was included as part of the newspaper's Thanksgiving stories, but I think this could just as easily be made for Christmas; the combination of cranberries, cinnamon, and red wine sounds a lot more Christmas-y to me than the spice combinations traditionally used for Thanksgiving dishes.  In any event, this was very tasty, with the tart cranberry layer nicely complementing the richness of the haupia.

The only thing was that the consistency of the cranberry layer was a lot firmer than the haupia, so that you'd go to cut off a bite and the force to poke the fork through the cranberry layer would squash the haupia (sort of like trying to eat one of those mille-feuille pastries).  I'd probably add more wine while cooking the cranberries, because there didn't seem to be a whole lot of liquid for the gelatin to work with in the pot with the cooked berries.  Thankfully, we have almost an entire bottle of Malbec that we can use for that!

Growing a Pineapple Entry 4 + Lilikoi sprouts

Update on the pineapple:  our new pineapple plants is going strong, with the leaves in the center growing quite a bit, and new leaves being added.  see the picture below.

Additionally, about the same time that we planted the pineapple, we planted about 30 lilikoi (passion fruit) seeds in a rectangular tray.  Two weeks ago we had two sprouts:

This past week, I split them apart before their roots could intertwine, and so the smaller one was put in a new small pot.  since then, two more sprouts have popped up (one is still very small and barely visible in the back-middle of the tray).

Growing a Pineapple Entry 3

After two weeks in the glass of water, the pineapple crown had grown decently long roots as shown in this picture:

We had a medium sized pot (8" diameter) available as well as some potting soil, so I filled that and made a small depression for the new plant:

And here is the planted pineapple crown:

After a couple of months, this will need to be reported into a 12" pot.  By then I should be needing to repot the avocado trees, which are currently occupying that size pot.

Growing a Pineapple Entry 2

Update on the pineapple.  At this point it has been 6 days since I started the pineapple in the glass, and now it has started to grow a few roots from the root nubs.  I will probably be potting it sometime this week.