Candied Citrus Peels.

I may be half a week late on this bad boy but here 'tis! I found this on Allrecipes.com, so this is the recipe plus my added tips and failures. I will say that this particular recipe takes a lot of prep time. The cooking itself is easy, since you pretty much just let the peels do their thing. But the cutting and peeling is quite the process so make sure you have a large chunk of time set aside if you want to take these on. Also, go ahead and figure out what candied citrus peel is used for and how you would go about storing them. Then get back to me with what you find. Here we go!

For the lemon peels, you will need:

-3 whole lemons
-2 cups of water
-2 cups granulated sugar, or as needed

1. Slice the lemons into wedges.
2. With a spoon or knife, remove the pulp.
3. Now you should be left with the peel and a significant amount of white rind. The goal is to remove as much of the rind as possible. You basically want to be left with a thin sheet of yellow with no white rind at all if possible. The rind is what makes it especially bitter. So with a knife, cut away the rind.
4. If your lemon peels aren't already in thin strips, cut them so that they're about 1/2 inch wide.
5. In a small saucepan, bring water to a boil.
6. Once boiling, add your lemon peels and boil for about 5 minutes or until "tender", whatever the hell that means. I'm not gonna reach my hand into a pot of boiling water to test their tenderness.
7. With tongs, remove peels and set aside. Add sugar to water and bring back to a boil.
8. Place peels back in the boiling sugar-water and let boil until "transparent". The recipe didn't specify whether it meant once the liquid was transparent or once the peels were transparent. But I decided it meant once the peels were transparent. They won't go completely clear, obviously, but let them boil for a fair amount of time until they're thin and coated with a good amount of the syrup.
9. Once finished, remove peels from syrup and set aside to dry. The syrup can now be used as a simple lemon syrup.

For the oranges, it's the same process. I used 3 large navel oranges and that was too many, so 1 or 2 should be just fine. Removing the rind is just as important  with the oranges. I found that the orange peels were tastier to eat plain than the lemon peels were. I also found that the orange sugar-water solution seemed to evaporate faster or more significantly than the lemon sugar-water did. This left me with much less, but much thicker, orange syrup than lemon syrup. In fact the orange syrup was thicker than honey and could have been made into orange suckers. I may have inadvertently used less water with the oranges, but I'm not sure.

Not wanting to waste the actual fruit, I made lemon compote and orange compote. The lemon compote has definite potential, but unfortunately this particular batch turned out much more sour than I realized. The orange compote was a straight up mistake and unless I can bake it into a batch of muffins or bread, I'll have to toss it. Or maybe I'll use it as a marinade. So many options, friends!

*Note: I wrote this on Wednesday and forgot to post it! I am so very sorry!*