Orange marmelade

Do you like orange marmelade? Well, maybe, if you are english :-)
When I was a child, we spent a couple of summer holidays in ireland. Great (!!) country and very nice people.
We usually stayed at bed & breakfasts and for breakfast you get the „irish breakfast“.
I would say, it’s the same as english breakfast, but since I was in ireland before I spent time in england, irish breakfast it is for me …
With the cornflakes, orange juice, eggs, bacon, sausage and black & white pudding also came toast and orange marmelade. I hated the toast, because it was already really cold and therefore quite dried up, when it reached the table. Mostly they used a little rag to cool the toast, so it won’t get soggy, I guess, but it helped cooling the toast even more. Aargh. So there was cold, dry toast and marmelade. Great. Not really, what an eight year old would hope for. But I loved the sausage and fried egg, so I got over it.

Eventually I found out, that marmelade tastes very good on freshly baked, still warm scones with plenty of salted butter, and since then, I am always happy, to eat marmelade.
I do cook a lot of jams, because I have loads of different berries in my garden, but I never tried to make marmelade myself.
I started looking for recipes some time ago, and found out, that you should use bitter oranges or seville oranges. Well, that is a problem, because they are nowhere to be found here. If you have an idea, please let me know.
Finally I bought myself a little bitter orange tree, and surprisingly it grew a couple of oranges at once.
Today is the day, that I harvested them and now let’s make some marmelade!
This recipe is adapted from Nigella Lawsons book „How to eat“.

My little tree only produed 550 g of oranges, so I topped it up with one gigantig organic orange.
Wash the oranges thoroughly and put them in a big pot with enough water to let them float.
Cook the oranges for 2 hours, I turned them from time to time, because I had the feeling, that they don’t do that themselves.
After two hours turn off the heat and remove the oranges from the water. As soon as they are cool enough to handle them, slice the oranges in half and remove the pips. Put the pips in a small pot wit a litte bit of the cooking water and let cook for 5 minutes.
Finely cut the orange peel into the smalles stripes possible or any other way as you like.
Put the fruit pulp, the peel and about 10 tablespoons of the cooking water in a pot. Add the water you cooked the pips in, but without the pips. Also add the preserving sugar and mix everything very well with a wooden spoon.
Put on the stovetop and bring carefully to a boil. Let simmer for about 5 minutes, stirring constantly so nothing burns.
After 5 minutes the marmelade should be fine.
Fill in clean jars, close the lid and turn upside down for at least 10 minutes.