Homemaking Tuesday: Oranges

About a month ago we talked about oranges and using them in cleaning. I started infusing vinegar with orange peels, and I have been saving orange peels and drying them for making an orange scrub. This week we will we talk about the infused vinegar.

As a disclaimer, oranges are not in season right now. Soon you can get those small mandarin or satsumas for the holidays. Being pregnant, oranges have been one of the few things I will eat without feeling gross (oranges and spicy food... Go figure), so have been buy oranges from Costco they aren't too bad.

 

Orange Infused Vinegar

• Collect enough orange peels to fill up the jar of your choice.
• Cover the orange peels with distilled white vinegar. Close and shake the jar until the air bubbles come to the top and top off with vinegar. Do that a couple of times until you can't add anymore vinegar.
• Then let it sit for a month. You can shake it daily or let it just sit and look interesting.

After it has set for a while is when the real work happens.

• Strain the mixture using a mesh strainer. 

This is what it looked like after just the strainer. So I decided to filter it.

• Then filter the mixture. I just used two paper towel over the mesh strainer. (You could do these two steps together, I didn't, but you could) The filtering takes time, I was impatient and squeezed it through.

After filtering it, no more black particles.

Now to make the spray.

• Measure the amount of infused vinegar you have and the pour that into a spray bottle.
• Make a 2-1 ratio of distilled water to vinegar (I had 1 cup vinegar, so 2 cups distilled water)
• Shake, label and use.

Couple of Notes:
I read that some people had very orangey smelling liquid and not so vinegary. Mine smelled like pickled oranges... Once I mixed everything it hardly smells like vinegar. I also hardly noticed any fragrant orange smell while cleaning.

I am going to try a different version of this recipe, which is just letting it sit longer. Maybe that one will be more orangey.

Also another site said that after they let the spray sit for a while the vinegar smell started to come back. We will just have to see what happens here.

And, below are links to the sites I used to make my infused vinegar. If you want to try something different look there.

Sources:
http://cleaneatsinthezoo.com/index/2012/03/23/homemade-citrus-cleaner/
http://www.green-talk.com/2012/03/28/orange-peel-vinegar-cleaner-make-your-own-green-cleaner/
http://poppyjuice-poppy.blogspot.com/2012/03/vinegar-orange-peel-homemade-cleaning.html
http://www.vicariouslyvintage.com/2012/03/16/orange-oil-cleaner/
http://susangodfrey.com/orange-peel-vinegar/