Citrus: sweet and sour by Malcolm W. Campbell BA, MAIH, MIPPS.

Most of the citrus that is exported is waxed to preserve it from deteriorating in transit and storage and some of the locally available fruit is similarly treated too. You may not be able to wax your fruit at home, but drying it certainly has the same effect. I helped my Grandfather dry oranges in his chicken incubator as a a small boy and those rock-hard oranges, when cut, tasted delicious and lasted years in the pantry, after they were fully dried. Now admittedly not everyone has a spare incubator in the garden shed, but even a tray of oranges or lemons on the back window in the car for a few months dries out the skin very well. If you have a ute parked in the sun for months on end, the result could be quite stunning providing you don't break too hard or get a frequent bout of the nibbles.

While oranges and lemons dry and store for long periods and I mean even years, the mandarins and clementines are best eaten fresh or juiced and their juice frozen. You cannot squeeze oranges and lemons and expect the juice to last for months in the fridge, but by freezing the juice into small cubes, you can add it to your cooking all year round.

The kumquats and calamondin of course make excellent dried and glacé fruit and for those that process and dry fruit they will be familiar with dried orange slices dipped in chocolate!

My favourite orange by product though, would have to be marmalade jam. I don't mind what it's made from and the varieties are indeed endless, but they all taste great to me. I've noticed that some of the best marmalade is made in Scotland where I doubt if they'd grow citrus at all. I've certainly never seen any growing there! Then again we can't grow mangoes where I live, but it doesn't stop us eating them or using them in cooking. I won't pretend that I cook my own marmalade, I speak to enough garden clubs and get given enough of it to keep our table well stocked. But if you make Australia's best marmalade, I'll willingly do your taste testing on my freshly baked bread. Some of the most highly regarded citrus for marmalade seems to be the "Poorman Orange", the various limes and the kumquats and calamondin, but at a guess I'd say any citrus that have pleanty of zest in their skin, would cook well.