Blood Orange Marmalade

Blood Orange Marmalade

Oh my! It has been almost a month since my last post. Trust me, I have still been cooking, I just haven't been blogging. Time to ring in 2009 with a recipe that adds a bit of summer to a cold winter day.
I am lucky enough living in Portland, Oregon to have a great local market (New Seasons) that has great produce. Recently that had a veritable cornucopia of citrus fruit. 4-5 kinds of tangerines, sweet limes, Meyer lemons and one of my favorite members of the citrus family, the Blood orange.
I was lucky enough to go to attend a semester of classes in Rome (Italy, not Idaho) while I was in Architecture school. One of my most vivid memories is of going to Campo di Fiori and seeing Blood oranges for the first time. I knew vaguely what they were, but having grown up in rural Idaho it goes without saying that I didn't grow up with this fruit on the table.
I had just planned to consume these oranges, but a happy accident occurred when I stumbled across a recipe for marmalade and I decided to notch it up by adding the Blood oranges to the mix.
I started with a couple of Blood oranges that I thinly sliced and added to a small sauce pan that had a cup of sugar and a cup of water. The oranges simmered for 30 minutes and then I drained the syrup, finely diced the oranges and then place back in the sauce pan with another cup of sugar and half a cup of water along with two tablespoons of lemon juice. I simmered that mixture for another 30 minutes, then cooled the mixture and place it in a jar and refrigerated it. This marmalade has such a great freshness that shames store bought imitators. Think about it, this is so easy to make that you can throw it together and still catch your favorite reality television series. At the worst, it will give you something to help get rid of the sour taste of "Superstars of Dance".