The kindness of (almost) strangers.

A couple of days ago my wonderful OH arrived home from work with a giant carrier bag of fruit from a friend of a friend. Apparently word has spread of my abilities to make use of almost everything that comes our way and if anyone could find a use for it all then I could. So after feeling a little big headed from my apparent fame I dove in to see what goodies had been kindly passed our way.
This picture doesn't really show how many satsumas there were (around 30!) but that glass mixing bowl is the one I use when making doubled up cake recipes!
So that evening was spent duly peeling the majority of the satsuma mountain, removing as much of the pith as possible and separating the segments. Next I packed them into some clean, sterilised jam jars and covered them in a simple sugar syrup (8oz of sugar to 1pint of water).
The next day I popped them (lidless) into the oven while I cooked the family dinner for around 25-30 minutes until the liquid was bubbling away furiously. Once ready I carefully took each jar out of the oven in turn and screwed the lid on nice a tight. As the jars and contents cool they create an air tight seal and a delicious popping noise as the "button" on the lids descend. And voila 4 jars of satsumas in syrup for my pantry. I could possibly have made 4 1/2 jars but some segments seemed to go missing during production lol.


(Please excuse the terrible picture my camera seems to be having an off day!)