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It’s not exactly a holiday time or a season, but, this is the time of year when we should be eating oranges and tangerines and grapefruit and lemons and limes. This is the time when they are ripening and at their best. In the stores you can pick them up and smell their freshness. I just got these blood oranges the other day plus my son gave me this Little Cutie, the best of the tangerines, in my opinion.
I hardly ever smell oranges without thinking about Southern California in the winter of 1954. My family and I had just moved there and I was not exactly happy about it. At fourteen, I felt that being forced to leave my friends back in Wisconsin was just plain cruel! It’s not that oranges saved my life but, they did make me feel better. Across the street from our new house was a beautiful orange grove. It went on for miles and miles. I would ride my bike around all the groves and up into the hills. When that whole orange grove bloomed the aroma was invaded the neighborhood, our home and all of our senses.
Oranges can be used in hundreds of dishes from muffins to cheescakes to salads to salsas and so on. My mother made a simple treat for her four children with oranges. She would peel an orange, separate the segments and arrange them in a circle on a plate. Then she would dust them lightly with powdered sugar and put half of a maraschino cherry in the center. It looked like the sun. We thought that was gourmet food. Try a treat of orange sunshine on a winter day. You’ll feel better.
