There is no sight more promising than a table full of veggies …

Last week, I inaugurated my brand new slow cooker by sort of following this recipe for ropa vieja. I enlisted Erik to do the yucky raw meat part of the preparation …



… while I went to work on the broth:



Erik also helped me chop the rainbow of veggies that we decided to throw in for fun. And then he went to sleep.



I combined everything in the pot …



… and set my alarm for 4:30 am so that I could get up and remove the meat …



… shred it …



… and then return it to the pot for another couple hours to marinate:



Can you guess what I had for lunch the next day??



It was sooooooo delicious … comparable to the meat that my coworker Belkis makes.



(Clearly, I’m almost an authentic Latin American chef!)

The next day, I embellished the stew with some spiralized zucchini:

Mmmmmmm. I rarely cook with meat, so I get really excited when it actually works!

I also made some fresh orange juice with this new addition …



… and then I obviously ate all the pulp:



I hadn’t made fresh orange juice since I was probably five years old. This was incredible!



I also went crazy and finally purchased one of these giant pomelos that I had been admiring at the market:



Since it was so huge, I planned to eat it 1/4 at a time for a little snack …



… but it was ALL flesh in there!



Obviously, I had to eat the whole thing since it was so small 😛

I was left with a big pile of peel and no idea what to do, so I started some googling and found that pomelo peel is excellent candied! I loosely followed the recipe I found (which I can’t locate now) and chopped the peel into 1-inch chunks:



And boiled it in fresh water three times to remove the bitterness:





And squeezed the peels between two cutting boards to remove as much of the moisture as possible:



I ended up with about three cups of peel:



The recipe called for 1/2 cup sugar and 1/4 cup of water per cup of peel. I improvised here thanks to this jar that’s been waiting for a job:



I probably used under 1/2 cup of sugar, 1/4 cup of water, and the last 1/2 cup of the key lime jam that Wife brought for me when she visited last year:



I whisked everything together in a saucepan over low heat until it was melted and reduced:



Next, I mixed the peel into the syrup until every piece was coated and then arranged it on a foiled cookie sheet to dehydrate in the oven for a couple hours:



I pulled the “candy” out of the oven while it was still a little bit wet …



… so that I could roll it in this:



And voila! Candied pomelo peel:

And super green fingers!

So sure, the peel still tasted like peel a little bit and I’m the only one who is going to eat it … but I still think it is pretty cool that I turned trash into candy 😀

Have you done anything creative with trash lately?