I’m mad for citrus. I love the colors, tastes, textures and scents of citrus. Lemons, limes, oranges, tangerines, grapefruits, pomelos, bergamot, lemon verbena, lemon thyme, lemon myrtle, limoncello. Put the word “lemon” in front of it and I’m likely to swoon.
A Citrusy Shade of Winter
Citrus makes the winter bearable. Citrus and snow. Each winter we await the succession of orange varieties that the onset of cold weather brings. Shiny Satsumas at Christmas time, often sold with the stem and emerald green leaves still attached. Santa even brought the girls the strangely named Buddha’s hand in their stockings this past year. It smells of citron and lemons and is utterly delicious candied.
January brought clementines from Spain, deep red blood oranges and big fat Sumo oranges. We enjoyed them all. I truly believe that our consumption of mass quantities of citrus is one of the reasons that no one in our family caught a cold, flu, virus or had sore throat this winter, despite my Lyme compromised immune system, my husband’s business travels on trains and planes to even chillier places, and my daughter’s exposure to the germ factory that is elementary school.
February brought Minneolas and the lovely Cara Cara navel oranges, all pink and ready for Valentines Day. Oranges seem to taste sweeter and more refreshing when they are peeled, sliced into pretty half-moons and refrigerated until cold.
Cuts Like a Knife
We have a saying at our home: cut fruit gets eaten. The corollary of the saying is: uncut fruit goes uneaten, sits lonely and sad on the counter, spoils, attracts fruit flies, annoys husband, gets tossed in the trash can by the husband, gets fished out of the trash can by the wife and re-tossed into the compost bin, where it festers un-decomposed until winter’s thaw. Sad but true. To avoid being another culprit in the global food waste problem, I try to cut fruits promptly after purchase.
Perhaps it’s a throwback to my childhood in Bangkok. There was always a platter of peeled and cut fruit on the table at every meal, lovingly arranged and within easy reach of little hands. Starfruit. Rambutan. Mangosteen. Rose apples. Jackfruit. Longans. Anything ripe and in season. Grandma preferred her fruits simply peeled and cut, while Mom loved to make fruit salads, tossing in a shot of Chambord or Grand Marnier when we were old enough to appreciate such niceties.
Fresh cut fruits are sold by street vendors at all hours. Thailand is a nation of snackers and nibblers. After school we munched on skewered pineapple cubes and green mangoes dipped in chili salt the way that kids in other countries munched on potato chips and Fritos. Of course this was Thailand in the sixties. American style junk food has long since reached Thailand, where you can now munch on crab and squid flavored Lays potato chips along with that bag of cut guavas.
Back to citrus. This is how I peel and cut oranges. It’s a simplified version of the fancy but wasteful technique of supreming an orange, which sounds like something the great Diana Ross would do in the kitchen. Come to think of it, Ms. Ross’s music is the perfect accompaniment to peeling and cutting oranges, Supremes or no Supremes. Crank up Stop! in the Name of Love, sharpen your knife, and let’s prep some oranges.
