The Thing About Grapefruit

I get bi-monthly fresh fruit and veggie deliveries from a great company called Farm Fresh to You. It is an organic food delivery service that ostensibly delivers cool and interesting fruits and vegetables that I can then turn into fabulous meals for my family. This is true, mostly. I could go into a lot of detail about the amount of time that I spend on said meals, which are met with blank stares by most members of my family, but who needs that. Really.

Recently there were a couple of deliveries in a row that had grapefruit. No one in our family likes grapefruit, no one likes grapefruit juice and now I'm stuck with about 5 grapefruit (which literally last forever) and since I hate to be wasteful, I just left them on my counter. And left them. And left them. They literally last forever.

Cut to me reading one of my very favorite food blogs www.smittenkitchen.com where I decided to search for grapefruit. She had made candied grapefruit peels, and they were beautiful. http://smittenkitchen.com/2008/01/candied-grapefruit-peels/ I figured if there was any way to get anyone in this family to eat grapefruit it was going to need to be candied and covered in sugar.

So I did it, I made them. I blanched them four times, I simmered them for two hours. I drained them for another two hours. This was a laborious process. AND THEY WERE GROSS. Bitter, unpleasant, with a bad aftertaste. Even coated with several coats of sugar. I couldn't even get Zoe to try one, even with all that sugar. She asked if it was still a grapefruit peel underneath the sugar, and when given the yes, she looked at me as if I'd lost my mind.

After consulting with a friend of mine who is a pastry chef I now know that after that first blanch I needed to really remove all the pith, the white stuff for those not as "in the know" about fruit parts. So, one more step to add to an already long process. But I'm in!

I'm going for it again, but this time I'm doing Meyer Lemon peels, because they are finally turning  yellow in my backyard, and I'm sort of a crazy person. Right? I'll keep you posted.