A cacophony of catastrophic grapefruit

What were you doing this week? I was impulse buying fruit. 

Now, it may seems that a shopping basket that costs less than £5 couldn’t really be classed as an impulse buy, but when you consider that my student loan is being spread more and more thinly over this last, endless term (I don’t finish until mid-July ), anything that’s not strictly necessary as a foodstuff needs to be regarded as an extravagance. Not to mention that every penny I spend now is a penny I can’t spend over my summer holiday, when it eventually comes, and we’re planning to go to Portugal. So; apples, yes, but anything more exotic, most certainly not. 

Except I should have known my own weakness for fresh summery fruits in almost all forms, which is why I found myself walking home with a big smile on my face and strawberries, grapefruits and a pineapple nestled in my bag. The scent coming from the grapefruits was intoxicating, a ripe, zesty wakeup call I could smell from across my room. I thought these little beauties deserved better than a sprinkling of brown sugar and a quick tan under the grill, so I scoured my favourite blogs for sweet grapefruit themed treats and came up with a promising recipe for grapefruit curd. 

Fruit curds, in all their manifestations, are lovely things. I’ve had success in the past with lemon and passionfruit curds, so I set out eggs, sugar, lemon juice and my pretty grapefruit confident I was onto another winner. Even the few direct hits of sharp juice I took to the eye couldn’t dent my enthusiasm and as the mixture started to cook, I threw open all the windows and turned the music up. 

Only then it all started to go a bit wrong. I began using the grapefruit curd recipe from honey & jam (it was one of the first to come up on Google), and it just didn’t work out for me. It didn’t call for any cornflour but after nearly half an hour of stirring, the mixture was still running around the pan like water. A quick survey of online lemon or grapefruit curd recipes suggested cornflour is a common addition and so I blended and stirred it in, and eventually (very eventually) the curd was thick enough for me to give up. Feeling beaten and a little forlorn, I seized upon the peel, carefully cut off in quarters and saved, as a way of salvaging the afternoon. Obviously, it just wasn’t my day, because after boiling strips of peel four times, as well as a good hard boiling in sugar syrup, drying overnight and a coating of my favourite golden caster sugar, the resulting candies were as catch-in-the-throat bitter as cheap, nasty marmalade. 

If only I'd given up here!

And to put the cherry on top of an already very disappointing cake, when I came to taste the curd- (because, hey, thin curd is still good for drizzling over meringue, ice cream, cake…) I discovered that while my tastings during the great non-thickening had been rather nice, in the meantime my temporary housemates had cooked a massive curry, which had spit into the cooling pan of curd. I scooped the flecks of rogan josh oil out, but the whole kitchen smelt pretty strongly of supermarket jarred curry paste and the sugar in the curd had done that trick sugar does so well of picking up and clinging to every aroma it’s given. It’s my own fault for leaving it out, but what can I say- I never realised I lived with people who would cook a curry at 10:30 pm, especially not so messily as to spatter a whole hob AND not switch on the extractor fan, or even open a window. 

You know, I think I may just eat the rest of my fruity haul quickly, before any more urges to mess with a perfectly good bowlful of fresh fruit take hold of me!