like-redonarose:

Has anyone done Jillian michaels body revolution? If so, did you use the diet guide?? I feel like it’s so expensive and I don’t have time to make those recipes.

You haven’t enabled the reply or the ask a question function on your blog so the only way I can answer your question is by reblogging and hoping you might see it.  

You don’t have to follow the recipes but she hasn’t stated it on the plan. I heard her say it on her Podcast. You must eat ‘clean’ though following the Yes foods and No foods info that can be found in the Kickstart section.  The Kickstart is lower calorie than the main section (but I can’t remember how much). The main section is 1200 cals a day for women, 1500 for men. So just stick to that calorie allowance and eat clean.

Having said that, you could also stick to Jillian’s 80/20 rule where you eat clean for 80% of the time and treat yourself for 20%. It’s up to you how you chose to do this over the week. One way is to use 20% of your calories a day for a treat food, that way you don’t feel like you’re blowing your diet.

Earlier in the week Nigel Slater reminded his Twitter followers that it’s Seville orange season by making some marmalade, so I looked up a couple of recipes to see the weight I’d need and then I went off to the market and got them (and a couple of lemons).  The market is in the city 15 miles away and I only realised the next day that they were in the produce section of my local supermarket at the bottom of the street. Oh well these things happen.  

I’m a Nigella fan most of the time but as she didn’t have a recipe on her sight I originally planned to go with Delias traditional recipe only to later find in my Googling that people had made Nigella’s pink grapefruit marmalade. I’d never heard of it so I shifted my lazy butt to my cookbook shelves and pulled down my copy of How to be a Domestic Goddess and there it was.  Perplexed that I’d never noticed an orange recipe before (I know her books pretty well) I then realised why, it was in the variation at the bottom of the page.  

It’s taken a few days for the chaos of life to settle down enough for me to get around to making it but I finally managed today.  

Firstly I had placed a couple of saucers into the freezer (more on that later). I then boiled 800g of seville oranges for 2 hours in water (always making sure they were floating just off the bottom so as not to catch) until soft

I then had to half the oranges, remove the pips into a small pan which I set aside with a ladle full of the orange cooking water.  I then scooped out the orange flesh into the big pan I had used for the boiling as this is where the preserve will be made.  I chopped the skin as I saw fit, I started by slicing it thinly but halfway through I chose to then finely chop the remainder and added all this to the pan.  Then put the small pan of pips and water on the boil for 5 minutes.  

Then strained the pip mixture into the big pan along with the juice of 2 lemons and added 1.4kg of preserving sugar (Nigella specified preserving here as she sometimes uses castor or granulated in her other jams) and stirred the mixture.  

Then I put the fruit on a low heat and stirred every now and then to get the sugar to dissolve before the fruit came to the boil.  Then boiled the mixture for 15 minutes.  At this time I took a saucer out of the freezer and placed a scant teaspoon of the mixture on it to test if it is at setting stage and waited around 30 seconds.  To test if it is set you have to see if the mixture wrinkles when gently pushed.  It took an extra 3 minutes of boiling.  I must say that I chose to go with just a slight wrinkle, only just perceivable at the edge as I had heard of someone’s grapefruit recipe over-setting.  

I sterilised my jars in boiling water and put them in the oven at 140c while the marmalade was on the boil. Nigella always operates on the principle of just putting the jars on a cycle in the dishwasher and not touching the insides when taking them out but I had to go through the other process as I don’t have room for one.  

The finished preserve is really nice but I would chop up the fruit finer from the start in future rather than leaving some of it sliced.  I’d definitely make it again and it’s made me want to make the pink grapefruit one too.  I’m also very eager to try Delia’s lemon & lime marmalade.