Oranges, and things

I was supposed to have guests this weekend but sadly they had to cancel, but I have been keeping busy, never the less.

It is marmalade season once again, so I have been shopping, and bought about 6lbs of Seville oranges with a view to making an initial batch or two of marmalade.

It's a couple of years since I have made any - two years ago I was preparing to move house, and had people viewing the house a lot (and I decided that it wasn't really practical to also move loads of jars of marmalade). 

Last year I didn't organise myself to do the thing properly and ended up making a small batch using a tin  of pre-prepared orange pulp and peel (which, it has to be admitted, works pretty well, but isn't quite the same, and doesn't, at least if you are me, give quite the same sense of achievement!

So this year I am back to doing it the old-fashioned way. 

The problem with the old-fashioned way, of course,  is that it does take a long time. Particularly the part where you have to chop orange peel into tiny pieces. (I'm limited, in the size of the batch I can make,  by the size of my largest pan, so I'm only using 2lbs of oranges at a time. However, juicing and chopping 9 oranges (and one lemon) takes time!

However, once that's done, you get to spend the next two hours with the lovely scent of simmering oranges pervading the house!

Then comes the exciting bit of adding lots of sugar, and finding out whether you have misjudged the size of your pan and the extent to which boiling sugar expands... 

And a little after that you get to put the marmalade into jars and to admire that beautiful orange-gold colour.

This original batch has yielded about 5.5lbs of marmalade, and I still have about 4lbs of oranges, so should be able to make a couple more batches, when I get time. Meanwhile, my toast-covering needs for the next few months are sorted, and I should be able to share the orangey goodness with my friends.

In Which There Is A Boat

Our next couple of days were fairly low key. We returned the car, did a fair bit of shopping (shoes, and a wedding veil, and several souvenirs, were bought, and postcards were sent) 

We spent some time with K's friend Liz, who lives in Fethiye, and we all got pedicures (Sadly, the place K used to go had closed, so we were not able to get little flowers and things painted on our nails).  We ate at a restaurant in the market where you bring your own fish (or go with the waiter to buy it) and they then cook it for you. We had calamari, and some kind of toothy fish. (Both were delicious). I visited Fethiye Museum, which is small, but interesting - I was their only visitor..



Included to show how clear the water was..

Then on the Thursday, we actually had to get up at a specific time, (quelle horreur!) as we had booked a boat trip, so needed to be at the beach on time to embark. All of us had done the "12 Islands" trip from Fethiye, so this time we decided on the "Blue Bays" trip, from Oludeniz. We embarked from the beach, and quickly found ourselves a comfy corner with 3 giant pink beanbags, and settled in to enjoy the trip. The boat carried around 30 people, and went to 5 or 6 spots where it moored to allow us to swim. 

It's fun. The water was incredibly clear and, except in the aptly-named 'Cold Water Bay' warm enough to be able to swim for as long as we wanted.

Lest we wear ourselves out with all the lounging on beanbags, swimming, reading, and listening to the cheesy 70s pop being played over the PA system, a young crewman came round periodically to offer drinks and ice-creams. Drinking freshly squeezed orange juice while lying in the sunshine  and watching fish a couple of metres below is a pleasant way to spend time...

The trip included lunch of fresh, barbecued fish (and a variety of salads) before spending the afternoon - you guessed it - lounging, swimming, and floating.. There was one island where we were able to go ashore and scramble among some ruins (I think relatively recent ones), and look down to the boat.

Then we chugged bag to Oludeniz, where the breeze which had sprung up during the afternoon made disembarking rather wetter and more exciting than embarking had been.

It was a very relaxing day, although unfortunately we all ended up having caught the sun a bit, mainly due to suncream being rubbed off by clothing, we think. (It turns out that Banana Boat's aloe Vera gel is very, very good in these circumstances - far more so than any of the other after-sun products any of us had!)

It's possible that when we got back to the flat we may have filled glasses up with frozen fruit juice diluted with gin, and spent a very relaxed evening...