PEACHFRONT SPEAKS

egnaro amustas orange satsuma

2009-11-05 - 10:09 a.m.

© 2009 by elaine radford

a bolivian yungas butterfly

Peachfront's Note: Check out my October 2009 Bolivia "Bird of Prey" trek: To start with Part 1, please click right here. If you missed any previous installments, well, here's Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and the thrilling conclusion, Part 6. Or check out my bird trip list with over 50 new life species.

My entire refrigerator, except for the top shelf with the eggs on it, is stuffed to the exploding point with satsumas. I'm almost afraid to open the door, for fear a bunch of satsumas will come rolling out. Satsumas for breakfast, satsumas for any time I feel hungry or bored and want to eat something random. Pork a la satsuma sauce for dinner. Some cranberry sauce made with lots of satsuma juice, to make up for the fact that the fresh cranberries I bought weren't really that good. I won't be buying fresh cranberries again, at least not this year. Yikes, people, if you grow a fruit that people can't tell if it's sweet or not just by looking, then you'd better make sure it is sweet, if you want repeat sales.

Seems to me...this is how the whole satsuma thing got started. One year, the orange crop froze in Florida and instead of dumping the oranges, they sold them in the grocery store anyway, because they looked OK on the outside and it wasn't until you got them home that you had the nasty surprise that they were all dried up on the inside. No way of telling just from looking. So that's it, I don't think I ever bought a bag of oranges again, and buying a single orange is pretty much something I've done maybe twice in this decade. But who needs them anyway, with the massive overflow of my own home-grown satsumas exploding out of the kitchen.

I may have gotten a bit of a reputation as a crazy satsuma lady. Twice now when I've offered them I've been told, "Um, I don't need so many." OK. But you don't know what you're missing. I'll just keeping working along on the project of making a certain number of them into frozen juice and organic citrus peel. IMOM scolded me for having so many glass containers saved. Ha. I'm almost out of them now. I'll have to freeze some of the juice in ice trays and then put the satsuma cubes in ziplock bags.

I have to say, the pork chops came out particularly well yesterday. I can make the recipe with skinny chops or thick ones, but yesterday I used thick ones. Plus some garlic chives and thyme from the garden. Plus a little bit of red onion that I'd previously chopped up and left in the freezer. DH had two big chops, and I thought he might have to save one for lunch today, but he ate them both. They're a hit.

Seven years of diary, and yet somehow the first place I look for my entries about "orange" I find this entry from April 2003 which is probably the very one I was looking for:

We watched Auto Focus last night. There seemed to be a hint of synchronicity with the "flaming orange" of the Blackburnian Warbler I saw Sunday and the dream I had Tuesday with the tiny, round, orange satsuma being used as a sacrament. In any case, I leaned forward eagerly to find out the meaning of it all when I heard these lines:

Bob: "I was thinking about orange the other day...the color. We take it for granted, right?"

Son: "The color?"

Bob: "But that's just it, just tell me...what is orange?"

Son: "I don't know."

Bob: "That's my point right there, you take it for granted. You don't think about stuff like that. It's just there."

So I still don't know the meaning of it all.

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