Candied peel

You can buy candied peel. This is a home-made version. It's not really necessary, but I tried it several years back, and now it's become one of my traditionals leading up to Christmas. If you do this, you need to make it from 2 days to a week before making the .

Ingredients
2 oranges and 2 lemons
sugar
water

Equipment

knife and board for preparing fruit
saucepan
sieve
bowl
drying rack
scissors

preparation time:
prepare fruit
make syrup
fist boil: up to an hour
leave: two days
second boil: up to 45 mins
dry: several days

Cooking process

Remove the peel from the fruit. I divide the fruit (and so peel) into four or eight pieces. Remove any white stringy bits. Put the peel in the saucepan with enough water to cover, and simmer until tender. This may take an hour. Drain off the water and put the peel in a bowl.
An alternative way is to cut the fruit in half, squeeze out the juice, cut into smaller pieces, then boil with the pith still in. When tender, pour off the hot water and put in some cold (to cool the peel down), and scrape out the pith at this point.
Put sugar and of water in the saucepan, and heat and stir until the sugar is dissolved to make a syrup.
Put the hot syrup on the peel in the bowl. Leave it for two days.
Drain the syrup into the saucepan, leaving the peel in the bowl. Add sugar to the syrup, and heat and stir until dissolved.
Add the peel to the hot syrup in the saucepan, put the lid on, and simmer until the peel is semi-transparent. This can take up to 45 minutes. Be careful that the syrup doesn't evaporate too much, or you'll get toffee!
You can use the peel right away, although it will be sticky to handle. Or you can dry it. Drain off the syrup, and keep the peel in a sieve over a bowl for a day until it stops dripping syrup. Then lay the peel out on a rack, turning from time to time, until no longer sticky. This takes several days. A warm place will obviously help the drying process.
You will need to cut up the peel before using it. It's quite tough, so I suggest using scissors for this.

Other ideas

This makes a lot of peel! But you have to do the same amount of work for more or less peel, so it's worth making quite a bit. It's nice to eat by itself.
Don't throw the fruit away when you remove the peel! Use them up in any way that you would ordinary use oranges or lemons. You can eat the oranges pieces by themselves, and use the lemon as a garnish, or cooking ingredient, or squeeze either of them to make juice.
Don't throw the syrup away either. You can make with it, or pour it over ice cream.