who only by moving can balance

Three kilos of orange converted into... many... jars of marmalade, plus all the clean-up. There is... a risk... that I will wind up making another 2 kg worth towards the end of the season; we shall see. (A is contemplating ordering another kilo of blood oranges toward the end of the season, when they'll be generally redder, and if so I'm going to experiment with adding the cardamom at a later stage in proceedings; despite the drawbacks of Insufficient Jars and also I Haven't Finished 2019's Marmalade I'm very much going "but what if I made a batch of bergamot-and-rosemary...?")

I have not built a decorative castle and taken photos because I've been tidying them away as they come, and am loath to extricate our lot from their pantry shelf again. I have, however, spent a fair bit of the past 24 hours having a peevish autism about what exactly all the recipes mean when they say "scrape out the pith": I had a horrible moment halfway through patiently separating zest and pith for batch #3 yesterday of "hold on... when they say... remove the pith... do they not ACTUALLY mean that I should... remove... the pith...?" (This is A Thing. When recipe say "over low heat" it turns out they usually want it less low than that; when they say "mix together as quickly and with as little handling as possible" they still mean not that little. I peeve.)

I have come to the conclusion that there is hideous inconsistency in what people mean. Some very clearly say "no, really, remove all of the spongey white pith from the bright-coloured zest", and some of them advocate leaving... some... amount.... of it attached to the zest! And so I have decided to merrily sunk-cost-fallacy my way to the dubious conclusion of, well, I've got good at actually separating the zest from all of the pith, and I would hate to think that the time I've spent on it so far could have been avoided, and clearly people like what I'm doing, so I'm going to blithely continue along as I have been. Probably.

( Notes )

In January 2021, I said

Lessons for next time (probably not until 2023, given that the last time I made any was 2018)...

I insisted to lemon_badgeress, in specific, that I definitely was not going to make any marmalade in 2022.

In February 2022, I remarked that

I insisted last year that I wasn't going to be making any marmalade this year

... while, of course, making marmalade, using a portion of the 5kg of blood oranges we had accidentally delivered.

It's okay, I said, to lemon_badgeress. I definitely won't make any marmalade next year--

(You see, of course, where this is going.)

Earlier this week, during his usual call with his mum, she asked A slightly wistfully if she should send us some more blood oranges. (We took her some of the blood orange marmalade I made from the previous lot and she discovered that she does, actually, under some circumstances, to her very great surprise, like the stuff.)

Today, while finalising a grocery order, A asked me -- with the page open in front of him -- if I'd like any blood oranges.

I do not like anything larger than a clementine unless it's been juiced[1], and he knows this. (During undergrad, when I was living with C and sharing groceries etc, knowing what "oranges" meant on our shared shopping list required remembering which of us had put them there, because she only likes big ones.)

Obviously, therefore, I said no. No I did not want them. No they were not relevant to my interests. Thank you! but no.

... and then, perhaps foolishly, I relented, and added "... but if what you mean is that you'd like to get some, and have me turn them into marmalade, as a Special Treat for you and your mother..."

And so, inevitably, this year I find that I will once again be making marmalade.

[1] ... or made into marmalade...