Gotta start someplace...

 Welcome to Fooding Around With The Kilted Cook -- a personal exploration of cuisines, recipes, ingredients, and techniques for making delicious, nutritious food for friends, family and clients.

My name is Ken Hulme, and I'm a foodie.  

I live on the Gulf coast of Florida in a 26 ft. sailboat.  Professionally I'm known as The Kilted Cook, a Personal Chef.  I go to people's homes and cook for them - either two weeks worth of meals on one Cooking Day, or dinner parties varying from two to two hundred.  That's why I'm a foodie -- to improve my creative abilities with food.

The Kilted Cook Logo

Why am I The Kilted Cook? In the 80s and early 90s I learned to "cook good" in self defense (long story there), and found that I enjoyed the creativity of cooking.  Before there was Food Network or The Cooking Channel,  I spent Saturday mornings watching PBS and studying with the great early TV chefs -- Julia Childs, Jacques Pepin, Graham Kerr, Martin Yan, Jeff Smith, Rick Bayless, etc.  I copied their recipes and techniques, read their books, and thought that it would be neat to be able to go to folks' homes and cook dinners for them.

However, I couldn't figure out how to make a living doing that sort of creative cooking.  I'd been a restaurant cook, and burger-burner, and knew I hated the repetition of that as much as I would working on an assembly line. 

Fast forward 20 years.  In 2001 I got laid-off (once again) from my career as a Technical Writer.  A friend showed me a magazine article about a woman who was a Personal Chef.  It told how she worked (and made money at it), gave one of her recipes, and had information about the organization she belonged to called the United States Personal Chef Association.  So I contacted the USPCA, read their propaganda, and attended their Culinary Institute in Phoenix, AZ just 90 miles south of where I was living at the time.  I became the first Personal Chef to hang out his skillet in Yavapai County, Arizona.  A county bigger than the state of New Jersey!   I had to be "portable" to work for clients as much as an hour and half away, so I called myself The Portable Gourmet.

Fast forward again.  I moved to Colorado, then to Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, then to Sarasota, Florida, cooking for folks all along the way.  When I came to Florida, I decided I needed a new company name, and because the area was originally settled by quite a few Scots, and I've been a Celtophile for decades, I became The Kilted Cook in 2007.  I now live in Fort Myers, FL and cater (in all senses of the word) to clients from Sarasota to Naples.

Check out my website  www.TheKiltedCook.info

Bass Drummer for the Kwajalein Pipes & Drums, 2006

 Enough with the personal stuff.  On with the food!

Making Marmalade in Ten Minutes
One of the things I love about living in Florida is the wealth of citrus fruits we have here - oranges of various kinds, tangerines, clementines, lemons, Meyer lemons, limes, Key limes, loquat, pommelo, grapefruit - as well as other tropical fruit like mango, lychee, starfruit/carambola, Barbados cherry, kumquat, and papaya.  I can harvest any and all of those because I have friends and acquaintances who have those trees and have more than enough fruit to go around.

Any fruit can be made in to jam/jelly/marmalade with the addition of pectin - the substance that allows fruits to gel.  Citrus fruits naturally have very high levels of pectin in the skin and pith, which make them perfect candidates for handmade marmalades, the likes of which you simply cannot buy.  Here's how:

Chop some citrus fruit into thumb sided pieces, meat, skin, pith, pips and all, and toss it in a blender or food processor.   A single grapefruit; or one lemon, one lime, and one orange (my favorite combination) will make about a quart of marmalade.

Take the chopped fruit for a spin until it more or less looks like marmalade -- bits and pieces of skin in a fruit puree.  Measure the pureed fruit into a large microwave safe glass bowl (don't use plastic).

To that measure of fruit puree add the same measure of sugar (white, brown, demerarra, turbinado, even Splenda (tm),  whatever you like).  Stir and taste.  Too tart?  Add a bit more sugar. Too sweet?  Add a bit more fruit.

Microwave on high for 5 minutes.  Stir and microwave again for 5 minutes.  Ladle into glass jars or snap top containers fresh from the dishwasher, and cool before refrigerating.  Will last for months in the fridge. 

Marmalade is good for so much more than slathering on toast or English muffins.  I love it on slow-cooked oatmeal.  Or as a glaze for chicken and Cornish hens.  A dollop of nearly-tart grapefruit marmalade on a plank of pan-poached grouper is fabulous.  A spoonful of marmalade on a serving of Greek yogurt makes a great dessert, too.