Three things happened in one week that made me reevaluate a significant part of how I live. First, I am re-reading The Power Broker, and I read the part about how Bella Moses insisted on her family having the best of everything, because she felt that people took care of things if they had the best things possible. Second, I found my copy of Fewer, Better Things, and vowed to re-read that again this year. Third, I got a pair of no-gi shorts.

I do a lot of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, but usually train at the Gi classes, where everyone wears the pajama-style kimonos that Karate and Judo athletes wear. No-gi is different – you wear a shirt and shorts without pockets (so that hands and feet don’t accidentally get caught), and there is less to grab; basically, you are fighting like you might in a street fight that goes to the ground. I like the idea of no-gi, but never made an effort to go to the classes, and I never really considered why. It turns out the answer was simple: the only pair of shorts I own have pockets, and I don’t like the idea of wearing them, and I never saw the point of spending another £50 to get a pair of thin shorts that had only a single, specific use.

But then I was on Vinted, and got a pair of no-gi shorts for £3. They arrived, and instantly, it was as if a new world opened up to me. It turns out that I avoided no-gi just because I didn’t have the right tools for it, but, once the tools were available, I was instantly interested. I immediately wondered what else I have avoided simply because I don’t have appropriate tools – not even the best tools, but just tools for the job that would allow me to do more than I have been.

It’s something that makes me face palm at least twice a day.

Another tool that recently arrived: a truly beautiful leather bookmark for Christmas, from Alice. Immediately, it was as if I needed to devote my reading to books worthy of the bookmark, because I don’t want this bookmark to be seen in the middle of crap. (James Clear probably has something to say about this.) I decided to go back to Pulitzer winners. Then, I made a pact with the father of one of Daniel’s friends to read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I initially thought it would be a one-week read, perhaps two at the most, but…well, I underestimated it, which is easy to do, considering the absolutely terrible blurb on the back cover. If you read this blurb, the book is about Joe Kavalier and his attempt to get his family out of Prague before the Nazis kill them all, and there is some amount of suspense involved in the tale. About half-way through the book, though, I was reminded of reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; when I read that book, I literally got to the last page and thought, “Wait a minute. Who killed the dog? Why doesn’t he find out?” and then, a second later, realized that the book was NOT a theriocide mystery, but was, rather, about life with autism, family strain and divorce, parental love, and getting the reader to better understand what it is like to live in a society that does not think about, or accommodate, people with disabilities. (Spoiler: you learn who killed the dog around page 60, which was like 200 pages before my epiphany.) Haddon writes such a masterpiece that I was completely consumed by it, to the point that I just accepted the narrator’s point of view without question.

Similarly, Kavalier and Clay is…well, first, it is one of the most perfect novels I have ever read. The efforts to get the Kavalier family out of Prague is an important part of the book, but, compared to the broader narrative, it is a smaller part of the book than the blurb describes. It is a lushly rendered portrait of America, and New York, in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s in a way that makes the pages burst with color – but in a way that is like the old black-and-white films that have been filled in by hand, more alive than life itself. Chabon’s language brings forth not only a complete world; he is adept at not giving details, and by doing this he brings the reader to imagine what Chabon wants to evoke. It is as if he is the writing equivalent of Debussy, showing the readers that it is the space between the words that matters as much as the words themselves. He writes of comic books, publishing, business, war, antisemitism, homophobia, and tells a poignant story where a comic book character, The Escapist, could also describe one of the main characters before, in the very last few pages, the true Escapist turns out to be another. Chabon writes so vividly, so energetically, so dynamically, that the chapters simultaneously fly by and seem to pass at just the right, incredibly slow, speed. He also is skilled at what Stendahl advocated: he gives just the right details to bring out the true essence of a character, or a scene, with nothing superfluous.

I mean, I am in love with this book, and am glad I was able to take a month to read it. It might take longer the second time around. Twenty out of four stars.

I was out with Nick in mid-January, and we saw an advertisement: Seville oranges, available now for a limited time. In past years, I have always intended to make marmalade, but the window for getting Seville oranges is so short that I might intend, in October, to make some, then remember my intentions in March, but by then I wouldn’t be able to get the main ingredient. Anyway, I ordered some, and three pounds came with the rest of our groceries.

So I wanted to make marmalade, and I wanted to do it in the Instant Pot. I found this recipe to start; the thing I liked about it was that it was in a ratio that the author said is easily scaleable. I love Michael Ruhlman’s work, and Ratio is, in my opinion, one of the finest and most empowering cookbooks ever written, simply because it explains why ratios are the true foundation of cooking. I like how he breaks things down and explains the way food works – it could be seen as filler, but it is informative, not like the 3,000-word blather that precedes most internet recipes.

Yes, I guess like this one.

Aside: I had a conversation recently with a Polish woman and a Venezuelan man, who were complaining about how Americans use Fahrenheit, because to them (and most other people in the world) it seems so ludicrous and arbitrary, even though Fahrenheit himself was from her home city, Gdańsk. I agreed with them, but also said that, in my opinion, Celsius was just as ludicrous; why use a system based on the boiling point of a single compound when Kelvin, a system based on absolute zero, was available? So this recipe represents my foray into what future historians will one day dub “The Temperature Wars”: I think that all right-thinking individuals should start to demand their temperatures in Kelvin, rather than those other, highly biased and likely politically motivated, systems.

The ratio here (two pounds oranges, two pints water, four pounds sugar, four tablespoons lemon juice) ends up being:

1. One part oranges (by weight)
2. One part water (by weight)
3. Two parts sugar (by weight)
4. Two tablespoons lemon juice per pound of oranges (or, as I did it, just add some lemon juice)

So my 1.5 kilograms of orange required 1.5 liters of water and three kilos of sugar, plus lemon juice. That, to me, is an amazingly simple way to remember how to make marmalade.

So this recipe started me thinking: what is marmalade? What are the key things to know with each step? Which steps are necessary here, and why? Going through this recipe:

1. Warm the jars in the oven.
   • This is a weird one, and I would actually put it later in the recipe, just before the marmalade is finished. The reason: yes, you want to sterilize the jars, but it is also useful to warm the jars and have them warm when you put the marmalade in because glass jars can easily shatter if they are cold and you put boiling liquid in them. So: sterilize the jars, but do it later, and put the marmalade in hot jars.
2. Boil the whole oranges in a pressure cooker for 10 minutes.
   • In the first part of the recipe, you put the oranges in a pressure cooker with an equal weight of water, then cook them for ten minutes. I used an Instant Pot. After the pressure died down, I took the lid off, and the oranges cooled over an hour. When I pulled them out and cut them open, the insides were liquified, and the peels were flaccid and slightly leathery. I used an ice cream scoop to remove the fibres and seeds, and to scrape the pith from the peels, then put the inside bits back into the water still inside the Instant Pot. I suspect that this step makes it easier to separate and reserve the peel for later use, so…it’s important.
3. Cool the oranges, then cut them open, scrape out the insides, and boil the water and the insides for five more minutes (without the peels).
   • Once the peel is separated, the liquid and orange innards are cooked for five minutes. I suspect that this extracts extra flavor from the orange, and possibly brings pectin out from the seeds (although this is less than exists in the peels). Before this step, the liquid was not as intensely flavored or colored, so I think this is probably a necessary step for intense marmalade flavor.
4. Strain the solids out of the liquid and throw the solids in your compost bin; then, put the peels, liquid, and sugar in a pot and boil everything until it reaches 105 degrees Celsius/378 degrees Kelvin. (And here: when you light the stove, start the jars warming; put the oven at 110 degrees Celsius/383 Kelvin for ten minutes, then turn it off. Boil the lids/rubber seals, too, and either heat or boil a jam funnel if you have one.)
   • Once the pressure is down again, I strained all of the solids out of the liquid and threw them out, then sliced the peel and added it back into the liquid with three kilograms of sugar, as well as the juice of two lemons. Then, I boiled it for…a long time. Maybe 30 minutes. It was a huge pot, and the edges didn’t really get to 378 degrees – they kept cooling while the center was hot, which, I suspect, delayed the setting. Meanwhile, I heated the jars in the oven (383 Kelvin) for ten minutes to sterilize them, and boiled the rubber rings in the Instant Pot (I figured I may as well keep using it).
5. Add butter.
   • The recipe calls for a “knob” of butter. I have no idea what measurement that is, so I added about 250g of butter. I…don’t know if it reduced cloudiness or made it taste better or what else it might have done.
6. Put the marmalade in the hot jars, seal them, and let them cool.
   • After the marmalade reached the setting point, I turned it off. Then I put the marmalade in the hot jars, sealing them.

And that is how we will be making marmalade for the next 20 years. It is simple and beautiful. We ended up with maybe 2.5 liters, spread out through four Le Parfait jars, a couple Mason jars, and a small honey jar. It is going on thick loaves of fresh sourdough, and seems to have set nicely. The boys are still getting used to it, but I think, over time, this will be an annual tradition that they will hold in their memories with fondness. Maybe I will work in an annual conversation about Kelvin, and then go shave with my straight razor, and, one day, they will read this and think, “Oh, dad.”

Finally: why do I call this real Scottish marmalade? Because, even if I am an American using an Instant Pot instead of a copper kettle, I now live in Scotland, and I made it here.

That, as Tweedledee said, is logic.