Citrus Season

My life has gone nuts in the last week, I am not kidding. I am going to write about it when the dust has settled, but for now, I will pretend that nothing happened and post this entry about citrus, which I meant to write all of January, finally wrote the day before my life went nuts, and have not had the time and space in my brain to post until now.

Sometime about two weeks ago, it was on a day with heavy snowfall, someone said to me on the hallway at work: "That's a little different than Arizona, isn't it?" and I answered: "In Arizona I'd be picking grapefruits right off the trees, wearing short sleeves!" Now there is a certain danger that with comments like that, I spread the erroneous idea that grapefruit trees are happy in the Sonoran desert. They are not. But they seem to be handling the sun and heat reasonably well if they get watered, and they are happy enough to produce fruit. So, citrus trees are a common sight in people's yards, bitter orange trees line many a road, parking lot, or outside seating area, and there is a road called Orange Grove, which is indeed the location of at least one orange orchard. Road names in the US often refer to things that disappeared around the time the road got built, so didn't think there were any orange groves along orange grove road, until I bought oranges from someone at the farmers market who assured me that that was exactly where they came from.

The University of Arizona campus, which is not just a park, but an arboretum and botanical garden at the same time, also has a large number of citrus trees, which I figured were worth learning about. Most of them are bitter oranges, which are not good to eat, and difficult to process into anything more edible. But to my pleasant surprise, the big yellow citrus fruits hanging on other trees on campus turned out to be grapefruits. Giant fruits with a peel several centimeters thick and sweet, juicy pink or gray-white flesh. At first I felt awkward foraging on campus, in plain view of hundreds of undergrads who were probably wondering exactly what kind of freak I was, but eventually I stopped by the responsible university office and was told that, yes, I was free to harvest the fruits from the campus arboretum. From then on, I didn't care what freak they thought I was, because I wasn't a freak but a human doing what humans used to do: foraging.

Throughout the year, campus supplied grapefruits, rosemary, bay leaves, tiny little red chiles, figs, lemons, and any amount of olives and calamondin limes I could ever want. The figs were good, but sticky business to harvest. The olives, I salt-cured successfully one year, and unsuccessfully the second year, for reasons unknown. I was clearly not the only one harvesting lemons from the one small tree there was, so I rarely actually got my hands on one. The calamondin limes, I made several jars of terrific marmalade out of one winter, and had enough of it to last me a second one. However, it was quite a mess dealing with the tiny fruits and their many seeds, so I never did it again. 

 

 

The most worthwhile harvest I stuck to year after year was the January and February grapefruit season. The fruits were harvested by other people, too, but it seemed that I was a more skilled and/or courageous climber than most other gatherers, so with a little bit of effort, there were still plenty of fruits within my reach. The most fun way to do it was to climb the tree and drop the fruits for a friend to catch. I'd carry bags and bags of grapefruits home on my bicycle. There was grapefruit juice for me every morning and greyhounds (vodka and grapefruit juice, a drink served to me first in Tucson's Hotel Congress, albeit with canned grapefruit juice) for many boardgame evenings.

Citrus season was also noticeable on the farmers market and to a degree in the stores, but the one thing that puzzled me was that it was next to impossible to find blood oranges in Tucson. One year, they were specialty items at AJ's (the upscale food store in the upscale part of town) and juicing them felt like unashamed decadence. The next year, Trader Joe's had them, something like 6 pieces for about 3 dollars, and they were available for about two weeks. Better than nothing, but not what I remembered from Vienna.

I have to say, in spite of the fact that there are no grapefruits to harvest here, I am quite happy with citrus season, first and foremost because of the enormous amounts of blood oranges sold by the bucket for a song and 90 cents in every supermarket. I am not kidding, this is what we got a couple of weeks ago, bucket included, for about 3 Euros (I can't remember exactly):

Blood oranges are wonderful juicing oranges, flavor and color of the juice are beyond comparison. Steve and I are currently spending 15 minutes every morning producing orange juice (it could be 5, but Steve doesn't like pulp, and straining the juice is quite a bit more time consuming than juicing). An apple a day? Forget it, a glass of blood orange juice a day! We are both dreading the day the blood oranges will disappear from the stores. But rumor has it that by then, the days are going to be longer, and some mysterious thing called "spring" may be around the corner…