"White Trash Cooking" At Home: B'anna's Crystallized Grapefruit Orange Peels

By Chuck Sudo in Food on Jan 12, 2009 4:00PM

The recipe, from page 83 of the cookbook. Below it is a wonderful recipe for pralines I\'m dying to take on.

This is the first of three boilings for the rinds. Since no time frame for each boiling was specified, I decided to boil the rinds for 3 minutes each time.

The recipe says \"cut however you wish.\" I opted for straight strips, making the peel look like fries or carrot sticks.

Have Annolon, will cook: the peels at the beginning of the cooking process with the sugar. Stirring is essential, to reduce the sugar and to prevent it from hardening along the sides of the pan.

The peels 15 minutes and an extra cup of sugar later. I could see the crystallization forming.

voila! The finished product, after rolling and a light dusting with sugar. These peels tasted so sweet and filled two medium Tupperware bowls. In addition to tea, I think they\'ll also work well with oatmeal or other hot cereals.

The saying goes "a watched pot never boils." Since the recipe we chose this week from Ernest Matthew Mickler's White Trash Cooking calls for three separate boilings of grapefruit peels, we suggest multitasking if you decide to try this at home. Walk the dog. Call your mother and tell her you love her. Clean that pigsty of a bathroom that started to smell like a gas station restroom (which is what we did).

Anyway, this recipe is simple and appealed to us in a "waste no part of the fruit" way. We opted for orange peels instead of grapefruit, as we had a week's worth of them from the daily orange we have as a mid-morning snack. It does make a marvelous complement for an afternoon tea as a side, tastes wonderful, and takes about an hour to make. The captions underneath the photos captures the step-by-step process.