Domestic goddess rating: 100% (marmalade queen today) Five-a-day: 5/5 Food miles: sadly, a marmalade-induced 700
On the menu: Toast, marmalade & juice (breakfast); cornish pasty (lunch); spaghetti bolognese and salad (supper)
Look what I did!
January is Seville oranges season, so I figured what could be more seasonal than to make some marmalade. Off I went to snaffle the last of the oranges from the grocer’s (leaving it a little late in the month, really), and here’s the result. I didn’t quite get a great set (I think I need to adjust the quantities a bit or something) but it tastes fabulous.
Now all this makes for uncomfortable reading on the food miles front, of course, as though this is undeniably the season for Seville oranges (and indeed all types of citrus), you have to ship them in from Spain. I’m a bit puzzled as to why we don’t produce our own Seville oranges in this country yet (perhaps it’s because then they’d be London oranges? or Bristol oranges?!). Loads of people produce beautiful lemons, mandarins and limes at home in conservatories, patio pots and greenhouses – admittedly in the south, and with a bit of help from the greenhouse heater as they have to be kept frost-free, but it is possible. And though I know there’s a carbon cost to using heat to produce crops commercially, we happily condone heating greenhouses to produce tomatoes in March, after all.
Anyway, for now we have to put up with driving them all the way from Spain instead. It’d be interesting to work out the carbon produced by driving a juggernaut 700 miles vs what a heated commercial greenhouse producing citrus chucks out. But in any case, this looks as if it’s one case where environmentally-friendly and seasonal don’t go hand in hand.
Filed under: Cooking, Grow your own, Recipes, Seasonal eating | Tagged: citrus, growing citrus, lemons, limes, mandarins, marmalade, oranges
