Grapefruit Marmalade

The first full school week is over and it's finally my day off again.

It's been a very busy week this week. I've ended up working every
evening to keep up with lesson prep and I have a lot to do tomorrow
before next week starts.

My target at the moment is to get into a routine where all of the coming
week's lessons are prepared before the Monday morning and I can use the
bulk of my prep time during the week to prepare for the following week.
If I can achieve this I think it will lighten my load at the end of the
week, Friday night and Sunday afternoon. I still have to work out how
the maintenance side of things fits together though; theoretically I
should be using a fair amount of my afternoon time to work on
maintenance of electronic equipment, computers and the telephone system.

I had my old quiet time group round for tea last night, Tristan, Katie,
Immanuella and Deborah. We had lots of fun and ate Penguin bars an
played 'cheat'. It was lovely to have them here and they didn't want to
leave at the end and implored me to have them round again soon. I
definitely will but I need to be careful to invite other kids at other
times so as not to develop any sense of 'Uncle Andrew's favourites'.

Today I'm making grapefruit marmalade. It's something I planned to do
since the end of last year. We had grapefruit jam here at school at the
start of last year and I ate it every morning at breakfast but not
everyone liked it and when it ran out they didn't seem especially keen
to make any more any time soon as it had taken so long to finish that
last batch.

I know there were several people who were quite keen on the jam and I
thought that maybe if I made some myself I could use it as birthday
presents for quite a large number of people and also enjoy it myself.

I've never made marmalade from scratch before so I'm a little anxious to
see how it turns out. I'm working from quantities scribbled from my
mum's recipe book at home but I've not got any instructions. I made some
orange marmalade in the summer but that was from 'Mamade' where you are
given the fruit, already reduced down, and you just add water and sugar
and boil it up together.

One worry is that the sugar we get here in Senegal behaves very
different to that which I'm used to at home. Probably because it's from
cane and not beet and I'm not sure how refined it is. The main
difference I've noticed is that it's sweeter and it doesn't melt so
easily. Not a great combination for marmalade making.

It took me an hour and a half to cut the three kilos of grapefruit this
morning and my knife hand is still feeling a little numb nearly three
hours later. I realised later that I could have saved myself a lot of
time and discomfort when I spied the grater in the cupboard and thought
back to the never ending task of cutting the peel into fine strips. A
lesson learned for next time at least.

I bought twice as many grapefruit as I needed by mistake (I had the
wrong number in my head and didn't bother to check it) so I'm doubling
the quantities and shall probably end up with over twenty jars of
marmalade! I do hope it's edible :os

Must go stir it again!