• 1kg red onions
  • 2 garlic cloves
  • 70g butter
  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 70g golden caster sugar
  • 1/2 tbsp thyme leaves
  • pinch chilli flakes
  • 1/2 bottle red wine
  • 175ml red wine vinegar
  • 100ml port
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Red Onion Marmalade for the PM

Who is the UK’s most notable female PM? Margaret Thatcher? Wrong! It’s Leeann, who works with daddy. She’s a very good Project Manager indeed – yes, OK “PM” doesn’t really stand for “Prime Minister” – but we can get away with this, we’re not in the business of being serious.

So on that note, are you great at project managing? Do you like red onion marmalade? Are you called Leeann? Do work with my daddy? Am I getting too specific? Well, if you’re none of those things, you might like it this week’s concoction anyway.

But more to the point, why did we make it? Well the UK’s most notable PM asked for it. Please take note, for she has spoken thus:

Dear Jess
My children (Amelia and Soren) love warm camembert with crusty bread and we rather like red onion marmalade to go with it….trouble is we can’t seem to find one we LOVE! There are ones we ’like’ but nothing really hits the spot. Either too sweet, not sweet enough, too sloppy, not enough onions and lots of sauce….eeeeuuuw…..I wondered whether you might be able to help us.
Yours
Leeann

I (Jess) said:

Yes, we can help you Leeann. I’m a Project Manager too. Here’s what I did. I engaged my daddy to find a recipe, buy the ingredients, prepare it, cook it, take photos of the process, bottle it up and write it up in this blog post. I’ve been far too busy to be ‘hands on’ – it’s all about delegation. I’ve got new bling to try on, princess DVDs to watch etc etc etc (if I had the time I’d love to help) but he’ll enjoy the whole process, bless him. Yo – that’s project management sister. Call me. Must dash…Love Jess x Over to him for a bit….

How we did it:

  • As you will have gathered, I was engaged by my daughter to act with ruthless efficiency (or else).
  • Jess had minimal interest (not much chocolate involved) and I searched around the web a bit but came back to the original recipe I found which was on the BBC website – although we went for half the quantities – might be regretting that now the rate we’re getting through it (I say “we”, I mean “Sarah” – Jess’ Mummy). I had to be careful with my recipe choice here, Leeann’s instructions were specific. And I’ve seen how she deals with clients if they step out of line (OK, very nicely as it happens – but this is food, not work).
  • We halved the onions and sliced them quite finely.
  • We melted the butter and added the oil and heated to fairly high temperature.
  • We tipped in the onions (seems like a lot before cooked, and then not so much at the end of the process). We stirred it all up, added the Thyme leaves, chilli flakes and added some salt and pepper and stirred it all together and put it on a low heat.
  • We cooked for about 60 mins, stirring every 5-10 mins. When the juice had dried off, and it looked slighty caramelised (and the onions were soft and gloopy), we added the wine vinegar and port and simmered over a high heat for 30 minutes.
  • As it says on the BBC website it’s done when drawing the spoon across the bottom of the saucepan clears a path that fills rapidly with syrupy juice.
  • Leave to cool, put in sterlised jars and give to a project manager you know, ideally a good one, called Leeann.

What we thought of it:

Well this was for the PM (Leeann not Margaret) after all – it was good! On the down side it was poorly project managed by Jess, who having issued the initial instructions to me, vanished into a world of pink, disney princessness. It’d be fair to say it was the worst case of project management I’ve ever seen. And I’m being kind with my words, I’m her dad.