Extra Citrus? Make some candy!

All of the holiday-themed magazines out right now are chock full of special goodies to eat and gift. Fudge, rum balls, cookies, breads-- Zips has caught the fever!

So in one of them (one of Martha Stewart's?), there were instructions for candied citrus peel. We have some excess lemons, a couple of oranges, and a new bag of limes. I only wish we had some grapefruit to add to it!

Candied Citrus Peels

Citrus! (2 grapefruits or 3 oranges or 4 lemons, or some of everything and throw in a lime while you're at it!)

4 c. sugar

water

The instructions are fairly simple, cut six slices into the peel of the fruit (but not through the fruit part) and peel away. Then use a small knife to slice away as much of the spongy, bitter white pith as you can. Slice into thin strips and cover in a pot with cold water. Bring it to a boil, dump the water, and repeat until you've brought it to a boil 3 times. Remove the peels and reserve in a bowl.

Then mix 4c. sugar with 4c. cold water. Dissolve and bring it to a boil, stirring and making sure the sugar doesn't crystallize on the sides of the pot. When it's boiling, add the citrus peels and lower the heat. Simmer (don't boil) without stirring until the peels are translucent (this takes about an hour). Turn off the heat and let them cool down. Remove peels and pat dry with a paper towel (you can reserve the sugar water-- you've just made a quart of citrusy simple syrup!). Then toss the peel strips into some sugar and spread out in a single layer on a wire rack for 30 minutes to dry.

I understand now that those jelly citrus candies I used to eat are basically a synthetic version of these candied peels!

We like them so much, they may not make it into the gift bags!

White Elephants, iEnvy, and Other Holiday Things

I'll admit it. I'm a PC. I don't have an iPhone, and iPad, an iPod. Never have. Not sure I want one. It seems like switching from being right handed to left handed (or vice versa). All my music is on the amazon cloud, not iTunes. Like anyone else, I love the slick, feather weight, intuitive neato features of all of these iGadgets. I just don't have any and can't afford them and don't know if I'd ever want to make the switch. I've looked at the Kindle Fire thingy, and I don't know if I need one. I think I'm just working out iEnvy.

This doesn't stop me from going to a holiday party with a "white elephant" gift exchange where a contingent of the attendees do that thing where they bump their iphones together and whip out their ipads so they can shuffle through photos and play Angry Birds while everyone looks on with envy. Last time we got together, two of them set up their talking tom cat and talking ben the dog face to face and they repeated what the other said in their funny voices.

The gift exchange rules is under $20, and fair trade, homemade, or re-purposed. I decided to whip up an iPad cozy. Even better, I decided to whip up an iPad cozy that looks like an iPad!

I had to extract my felt from under Zipper, who has not moved from this stack (and is nestled in a ball in the same spot as I type this)

And did a lot of google image searching for the physical dimensions of ipads-- (and I'm not sure if they have a 1 or a 2!). And what the app icons look like. I'm also not sure what apps my friends have or would probably have. So I settled for Skype, Angry Birds, Safari, and the camera and photo album apps. I would've done the notepad, but didn't have a light yellow or brown. Same for the YouTube app-- that looks like a brown old-fashioned tv.

Stitching them on helped to add details.

I added a battery, and wanted to add more details to the top row, but decided to stick with simplicity

The cardboard inside is (hopefully) cut to the actual dimensions of the device itself. Secretly I hope the 3 ipad owners fight over who gets to take it home.

We figure this is the closest we'll ever come to owning one, but even holding the cozy makes me really wish I had something to stick inside it. Or maybe this is just iEnvy working on me again!