Make marmalade?
At least, that’s what I’ve done.
A while back, I bought a large sack of grapefruits because I am wild about grapefruit, plus the price was extremely tempting. Apparently, they were on knockdown price because they weren’t very good. There was something a bit off about the flavor and the texture. Most of them were sort of mooshy and those that weren’t were dry and granular.
Because I can’t abide to waste food, I thought, “well, maybe I can improve them by dredging them in sugar and running them through the dehydrator to make a sort of grapefruit candy.
Well, that wasn’t very good, either. They turned half crispy, half very-sticky. The flavor was better, but the combination of crisp and sticky was not appealing. The candied grapefruit slices sat in a Rubbermaid box for a couple of months, until today, I got the notion that perhaps they could be redeemed by incorporating them into a sort of ad hoc marmalade.
First things first, I chopped up the dried grapefruit slices in the food processor until they were about the size of bread-crumbs such as you would use for making fried chicken. Then, I squeezed the juice from four fresh grapefruits I had in the fridge and shredded the peels of two-and-a-half of them. I combined all of the dried grapefruit, the squeezed juice and pulp, and the shredded rinds into a big enamel pot, and simmered it for about 15 minutes, with five teaspoons of powdered pectin.
Then, I divided the lot of it between two pint jars, one of which also carried a teaspoon full of whole coriander seed. The stuff I cooked up today tastes like grapefruit marmalade, and it looks like it, so I shall call it grapefruit marmalade and self-declare success.
Hah! Food was not wasted