Before I get into how my husband makes these I have to warn you, at least according to him. This recipe involves a lot of boiling and draining, so please be careful. He said “cooking this will probably kill you and while I am joking, I’m really not”. Those are his words, not mine…so please, please be careful when you make these. Cooking is not one of my strong areas…I am not much of a cook. That is why I follow all those cooking blogs, I need to learn some things. Asking my husband for instructions and me trying to figure out how to write it and put it all together was quite the challenge. I don’t know if this is dyslexia or what, but it becomes comical when I try to explain something I want done and he gives me a stare or vise versa. I am sure we drive our adult children crazy with this. You can imagine the challenges we faced when remolding our little red house, but that house did get done, frustrations and all. Now onto these little candy treats from nature.

Ingredients you will need:

1 cup of sliced orange peels

½ cup white sugar

¼ cup water

Prepare your sugar tray before you get started. You will need a baking pan and wire rack and tons of sugar (about 2 cups) put to the side.

step 1- peel oranges.

Step 2- you will need to be very careful with this part. Cut away as much as the inside of peel as you can, leaving the outer layer intact.

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Step 3-cut into little strips.

Step 4- place peels in saucepan & cover with water; bring to a boil over high heat.

Step 5- once boiling, reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes.

Step 6- Drain and repeat this process two more times.

After you have boiled and drained your peels 3 times, leave them in colander to drain for at least half an hour. My husband drains his for at least an hour.

Syrup.

In medium saucepan heat sugar & water over high heat until boiling. Place peels in syrup using tongs, reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes until sugar is dissolved. Remove peel with tongs or slotted spoon and dry for 1 hour on wire rack with wire rack over a baking pan.

There reason you are drying your peels over a baking dish is so that the orange drippings will fall into the pan and coat the sugar with yummy orange flavor, that’s where a lot of the flavor will come from. After an hour of drying put peels in sugar and coat them completely.

Put your peels back on drying rack and let them dry overnight.

When the peels are dry then place in airtight container. Hope you all get a chance to enjoy some of nature’s candy. I know I don’t have to tell you this but the secret ingredient here is SUGAR with a touch of orange.

Hope you all liked this re-post from the past. I picked this older post to share with you all again because I believe these little candies are great for eating right now during the cold and flu season. There is something in oranges that helps with keeping us healthy. The sugar isn’t good for us though. Maybe these can be a special treat now and then and you can just eat the regular oranges everyday. In our house I try to always have bowls full of oranges for everyone to eat and we drink lemonade all year around. Arizona is known for their citrus. We have groves of citrus all over this state. I grew up on citrus being a big important food source for us. We eat them all the time here. I hope to have some new posts for you all later this month. I have so many cool ideas to share but right now we are getting our house in order. Have a happy February everyone and eat more citrus if you can.