How to use (nearly) all of the sugar in the house

The other day I was scoping out some good snack recipes on the Whole Foods website, and I came across this one. It was a recipe for candied orange peels that looked simple enough that I had to try.

Ingredients, you ask? A very complicated list, I assure you. 6 oranges and 5 cups of sugar.

The preparation for took most of the time. The recipe tells you to peel the oranges using a vegetable peeler, but I found it easier to quarter the oranges and (slowly) cut away the fruit, pith, and then stick the rind in a bowl. I ended up separating the pith from the fruit so that I could blend it up and freeze it with another cup of sugar for a sorbet-like orange freeze. (It's happily freezing away in the downstairs freezer right now.)

After cutting up half an orange and spending about twenty minutes on the one orange, I stuck Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone into my computer's DVD player and watched that while I worked. After a while, I did get faster and more efficient at peeling oranges, and it didn't take as much time to peel one orange.

It took me most of the movie to peel the oranges using the knife instead of the peeler. (Harry was facing Quirrel when I finished.) After that, it was a series of boiling and simmering for about an hour and a half and then rolling them in sugar and letting them dry... and voila!


Aside from the orange sorbet, the other biproduct that came from this was this orange-flavored sweet water that the peels simmered in for an hour.


The recipe suggested that I jar them and use them to sweeten tea... so I have. I'm enjoying some lovely organic fruity tea right now and used the syrup to sweeten it.

Once they dry, I am thinking that I will separate them into bags and give them away to people. It is the season of giving, and there are an awful lot of orange peels there for one family.