Fruition

As part of my attempt to change my life in 2012 and use or sell all of the fruit growing on our Fallbrook California farm, I turned this

into this

on Tuesday.

Kitchen alchemy! you're thinking.  How can I work this magic in my own home?

Or you're thinking, Here in Fomalhaut-b we'd never eat something that looked like that.

It begins with Martha Stewart, as so many delusions do.  Here's part (but not all) of the recipe for candied grapefruit peel printed in the January or February 2012 issue of the magazine (they've stopped printing the date on the pages I tore out, but if you have any citrus growing in your yard, buy the magazine).   

And here's a close-up of the results as shown in the centerfold:

If you scroll back up to the photo of my actual candied grapefruit peel, you may notice a slight discrepancy.  Instead of pastel sugared pommes-frite-y things, I got hard-crack lizard skins.  Naturally, I considered throwing the whole sticky mess away--which, you may have said to yourself already, is what one normally does with grapefruit peel--but then I would have wasted two cups of sugar, thirty minutes of tricky cutting, and 90 minutes of cooking gas, and anyway, to be frank, the entire experience reminded me of nothing so much as writing fiction.  During the writing phase, you imagine it all pale orange and sugar-dusted, something you'd serve with love and pride to strangers and friends, but when you stare at your book two months after publication it looks like burnt lizard skins on a tray.

So I tasted one.  It was sweet on the outside and bitter on the inside.  It was hard and crackly and roasty and dark, and it reminded me of a poem I learned when my mind was still pale orange and sugar-dusted, meaning I was a freshman in college and reading Stephen Crane, William Blake, and Dostoyevsky for the first time.  The lines that came to me were from "In the Desert" by Crane:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter--bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

I let my ruined candy cool on a wire rack, and then I smashed it to pieces and dropped it into a bowl of powdered sugar, which made it look nicely medicinal, and I made my husband try a shard.    "Like horehound candy," he said.

Even though I'd made something edible out of something I normally throw in the trash, I couldn't help wondering what went wrong.  I found that I still wanted the candied peel as it looked in the picture, as it had been promised to me by that phantasmagoria of kitchen dreams known as Martha Stewart.  Why hadn't the recipe warned me to keep an eye on that pot of peels in case things took, as they certainly did, a Dark Turn?  And isn't this what one would naturally expect when boiling sugar water for 90--yes, NINETY--minutes?  That things might, however low the heat has been turned, round the bend to Hard Crack stage?  I've dallied in my life with fudge and fondant.  I've loved and lost the odd batch of cooked French buttercream.  Most candy recipes suggest a thermometer and demand that you hover as you would hover over a child whose fever has reached 103 degrees, and even then, you never know.  You're in the hands of Fate.

So imagine my surprise when I looked on-line for Martha Stewart's candied citrus peel and found not the recipe I used but this one from the January/February 2010 edition of Everyday Food. Instead of the peel of one grapefruit and two cups of sugar, one is supposed to assemble:

• 2 grapefruits
• 3 oranges
• 4 lemons
• 1 1/2 cups sugar

Instead of cooking the peel for 90 minutes, one is urged to boil it for--is this not a gigantic difference?--ten minutes in water and then 8-10 more minutes in one cup of sugar mixed with one cup of water.   So we have the peel of nine fruits, not one, boiling in roughly half the sugar water for 20 minutes instead of 90.  

What could I do?  I had lots more grapefruit because that's the challenge here--insane quantities of citrus just dangling around like this is the Garden of Eden.  I had these lemons plus thirty more, and I had a basket of oranges, and I had a new bag of sugar.  So I prepared the Everyday Food quick-boil version, and I got soft, limp, sugary strips you can dunk in chocolate sauce and eat even if you have no teeth:

They're nice.  I'm enjoying them.  But I'm not going to lie.  It's the former version, the one that cooks too long and gets too dark (if my experience is any indication, and it might not be), that I recommend and hope to cook up again.  I ate the last shard of Jimmy Crack Grapefruit Peel while I was pecking away on my Untitled Work with the usual mix of hope and despair.  I asked myself, "Is it good, friend?" and I told myself it was bitter but I liked it.  Because it was bitter, and because it was my heart.