Our Life Together: Fairy Lamp

We hit pay dirt this week. Cupcake saw an ad for a fairy lamp for sale in the great city of Narrows. We made contact with the seller and asked to pay for it online, but they were only interested in cash payments. So, we got up bright and early the next morning and made the schlep to Narrows, so we could be at the doorstep at 0900hrs.

There are no cracks, chips or repairs, and the bottom is stamped with the man who invented them's name. Research says these are the most sought after of all the lamps.

It's obviously been in someone's family for generations. They stopped making them around 1850, so we're thinking we've got a 200ish year old antique on our hands.

This was the big deal for the week. The rest of the week was pretty much staying out of the world's way, so we thought rather than showing that we made another batch of blood orange marmalade, we'd do a recipe.

So we started off with two bags of blood oranges. We juiced four or five oranges until we had one cup of juice.

After we had our cup of juice, we sliced the ends off of the rest of the oranges (because the ends look funny) and put the oranges in the food processor for slicing.

If you don't have a food processor, slice them as thin as you can with a knife, thinner is better.

After slicing, we put the oranges in a large pot and covered with water, and brought it to a boil. Boil the oranges for at least twenty minutes.

After the mix boils for twenty minutes, drain the water off and weigh the oranges.

Put the oranges back in the pot, then measure out an equal amount of sugar.

Put the sugar in the pot with the oranges, and add your cup of juice to the mix.

Set the heat to medium high, and stir the mix until the sugar dissolves. Bring to a boil and stir from time to time. Let the mix low boil for at least thirty minutes, the color will get darker and start to thicken up a bit.

Jar the mix into either jelly jars of pints, your choice. Then water bath for 10 minutes, just like any other jelly.

While the marmalade was cooking, Lawman made a batch of grape juice.

Have you ever lost a bag of grapes? We did. But we found it a couple of days ago. The grapes had gotten a little soft/mushy. We hate to waste anything, so we decided to use them for juice. We jarred them up in four quarts, added 1/8th of a cup of sugar to each jar, then filled the jars with boiling water. Then we left the jars in the canner while the marmalade was cooking down. After about thirty minutes, we took the juice off and put the jelly jars in the canner.