If I ever had a house with a garden, I’d grow oranges. We do grow oranges in Slovenia, too, but I’ve never spotted them in any market place yet. Same as we grow olives, figs and persimmons, but you can only buy them if you make a trip to the coast and IF they happen to be for sale at all, in which case they’ll cost a fortune anyway.
Last week I read that we’ve started growing even bananas! Now we can call ourselves a proper banana republic.

However, oranges haven’t been always available here. My grandma told me that when she was a child, getting an orange for St. Nicholas (not Christmas) was for her the most precious present she could get – oranges once used to be an exotic fruit – while today we could hardly imagine that. They are widely available all year round, and most of them come from Italy, Spain and Greece… in summertime even from South Africa.

I tend to buy them during winter only, when they are in season and hence cheap(er). Usually they cost 1.50 € in February and that was the lowest price – last week it already rose to 2.50 €. They cost much more than these modern plastic oranges but I can not imagine buying them anymore; those waxed, puffed up, odorless “fruits” just don’t seem attractive to me. Once you’ve smelled an old-style fruit and eaten a slice of it, you can’t go back: its taste and aromas are too overwhelming.

I’m keeping oranges in a fruit basket in living room, close to my armchair, and whenever I’m sitting there, I can smell these aromatic fruits. Sometimes I’d even grab one and inhale its amazing aroma from very close – I can’t imagine a better air freshener, can you?

Squeezing an orange the old-fashioned way

So, what do I usually do with oranges? I peel, slice and eat them, I use grated peel to give aroma to desserts and drinks, I make orange-yogurt mousse, orange-yogurt cake or – well, orange juice. If you’ve ever tried store-bought orange juice, which normally comes out of a “concentrate”, you will know that those juices have very little (or nothing) to do with freshly squeezed juices. If you’re one of those who enjoy the taste of real orange juice, you might want to try it my way. Here’s how I prepare it lately:

ORANGE-FLAVORED ORANGE JUICE

oranges
water
sugar
grated peel of one non-treated orange

Blood orange juice

1. To prepare orange flavored sugar, grind sugar and orange peel in a coffee grinder.
2. Squeeze the juice of oranges (you can filter it if you want) and add water (proportions oranges : water – 2 : 1 or 1: 1). Stir in the flavored sugar and serve cold.

I don’t think you can get an orange juice to taste more orange-y than this one. Try it with blood oranges or with a mix of both, or add some scraped vanilla seeds to the sugar mix.

99.9 % pure orange