Sustainable Living

We have so many oranges in our gardens that we can hardly eat them all before they fall down. We tried to find different ways to preserve them. One very nice and quite easy recipe from our Sustainable Living coordinator Luke was to cook them together with pumpkin to get a delicious jam.
After we picked a lot of oranges and got a pumpkin from one of our neighbours, we started cooking.

This is how we made it:

1. Cut the pumpkin in small pieces, boil for 5 minutes with a very small quantity of sugar.
2. Strain the pumkin and weigh the quantity. For each kilo of well drained pumpkin, put the juice of 3 oranges and the juice of ½ a lemon.
3. Use a blender to mix the ingredients until you reach a puree, than you add about 1 kilo of sugar.
4. Boil the mixture for 15 – 20 minutes, stirring continuously.
5. Once boiled, let the mixture slightly cool and than pour into steralized jars.
6. Turn the jars upside down to create a vacuum, let them totally cool down and store them at a cool place.

Afterwards we had a lot of orange and lemon peels left which we didn’t want to throw away. So we decided to make some nice sirup out of it.

If you want to try it yourself, here’s how we did it:

1. We put the peels in a big Wok.
2. Filled it up with water
3. Added about 1 kg of Sugar
4. Let it boil for about 45 minutes on the gasifire, which gets very hot (here is how to make a gasifire, also known as biomass gasification cooker: https://www.sunseed.org.uk/blogs/2013/10/31/biomass-gasification-cookstove/)
5. Let it cool down, fill into jars, turned them upside down and let them totally cool.

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