How to Make Really Bad Marmalade

1. Start with beautiful Seville oranges and a few lemons. Place them on your fabulous new bamboo countertop.
   
2. Follow the recipe from one of your favorite cookbooks, Mary Anne Dragan’s Well Preserved.
3. Cut the oranges into the tiniest darn slivers you can possibly manage. These? These are way too big. Don’t do it like this.
   
4. Spend all of your Saturday night sweating over the stove happily jamming away. You’re making marmalade after all, and you know how much you love marmalade.
5. In your excitement, give two jars of the stuff to your brother-in-law who happens to be visiting so that he can take them home to your sisters-in-law (note: he is not married to two women, but your sisters-in-law do live in the same town). Do this without first tasting the marmalade to make sure it’s good. Say to yourself: “Wow, these look awesome! They’re going to be fantastic. My sisters-in-law are going to be so very impressed!”
6. Wake up the next day and make gluten-free scones. Pour (uh-oh, why is it pouring out of the jar–it didn’t gel?!) copious amounts of the liquid orange stuff onto your beautiful scones.
7. Watch your husband’s face as he tries to hide his displeasure.
8. Take a bite.
9. Die a little inside as you realize your marmalade totally sucks–it’s bitter and soupy–and you actually gave away two jars of it to your poor, unsuspecting female relations.
10. Learn these hard lessons about making marmalade:
    • Cut the orange slices thin, microscopically thin.
    • Don’t trust the recipe for cooking time nor your thermometer for Jelly temperature.
    • Use the thermometer and the plate test to test for gelling consistency before you put the marmalade in the cute little jars and process them.
    • Always, always, always taste things before you serve them to people, or god forbid, send them to your sisters-in-law. (You thought you had learned this lesson a long time ago, but alas, you are a bad student.)
11. Console yourself with how pretty it looked on the scones.