Our Pastor dropped off a fruit basket for us since Christmas is only 4 days away. Among other fruits, there were some oranges in it. This caused me to think about oranges. Gee, I can write a story about anything at the slightest reminder can't I! I’ll see if I can “squeeze” this story in. Whatever happened to homemade fresh squeezed orange juice? It seems like all you can find these days is canned orange juice “concentrate” that has no pulp and a lot of corn syrup or sugar in it. Worse yet, you can buy “Orange Drink” and in small print on the ingredients label, it states, with 5% real juice. More often it says, “Contains no fruit juice”, or worse yet, “artificially flavored”! All of which are heavily sweetened with corn syrup! Corn syrup has replaced sugar the last several years probably because it's cheaper to add to everything! Back when we were kids, we had an orange juice squeezer to make fresh juice from real oranges. It was white metal with a chrome domed top and held an orange half and had a chrome lever that when pushed down would squeeze the orange and make orange juice. It was unsweetened and had a lot of orange pulp in it. It was GREAT tasting! We also had a glass squeezer that produced fresh orange juice by pushing down and rotating the orange half. The top was ribbed and tapered. It looked like the pic below, only it was made of thick glass. It too produced orange pulp. I would think that these days with every food claiming to be “natural” that these would be proliferated in any store. I haven’t seen any in stores for years. I guess these days if you can’t microwave it or get it out of a can or freezer, that no one has any use for actual natural things like real home made orange juice. The "natural" kick that was all the rage in the 1970's has morphed into the "low fat" "sugar free" fad of today.

 

The very few times when I was a kid that we did buy orange juice concentrate in cans, the best use I had for it was the can. Back in those days, orange juice concentrate cans were made of steel. The empty cans came in handy for fixing broken exhaust pipes on our cars. We’d open both ends of an empty can and it was just the right size to connect 2 pieces of exhaust pipes together. Try that with the cardboard cans these days!

 

I love oranges. I even have an orange cat! I still eat an orange the same way I did when I was a kid. I cut it in half, then eat the top half of it by scrapping it off with my front teeth. After that, I turn it inside out and all the wedges stick up and separate so I can eat each one. My favorites are California Navel oranges. These peel easily and have no seeds. The aforementioned method is for use only for Florida oranges. When I was in the Navy, I did temporary service in Florida. The smell of orange groves has never left me! Oranges down there are so much better than the ones they sell in stores. I never realized that retail oranges were artificially colored orange! Down there they weren’t artificially colored and were bigger and sweeter.

 

Our grandfather Stacey went to Orlando each winter and besides Indian coconut heads and “canned sunshine”, he brought back “Orange Blossom Perfume” for my sister. Now that smelled just like the orange groves I smelled in later life! I wouldn’t mind getting some more of that just to smell! Of course, I’d keep it out of sight so “people wouldn’t talk”! The times I've been in Florida and when they were in season, I've acquired real oranges. They are great down there and nothing like the phony artificially colored and nonfresh ones up here.

 

Every Christmas we kids would get an orange in our stockings along with a bunch of other stuff. This must be part of a Christmas  tradition or something. It least it was better than coal, which we actually deserved. When I was a kid, I planted an orange seed in a pot inside the house. After awhile, it started to grow and I envisioned having a big orange tree to pick fresh oranges from! For some reason, it never got very big and eventually died. One reason was probably due to the fact that I never watered it! I probably should have planted a cactus seed, but that too would have died from lack of water! At that age, even if I had planted an artificial flower, even that would have died from lack of water!

 

Our mother could work wonders with oranges. She made a salad consisting of cut up orange wedges and bananas that was really good! My favorite pop when I was a kid was orange. They used to have an ice cream bar that had creamy vanilla ice cream coated by an orange coating on the outside that was really tasty. Remember the "pushups" that were orange sherbet in that long round cardboard tube that you pushed up with a wooden stick? Goooood! I tried a modern "pushup" with a plastic stick, but it wasn't nearly as good as the ones when I was a kid. Of course, I haven’t found anything like that these days. It's getting hard to find real ice cream made with sugar these days, since they are on this trendy "sugar free" and "low fat" foolishness. This results in horrible tasting "ice cream" as far as I'm concerned. Hence, I rarely eat what passes for "ice cream" these days unless I can find the real stuff.  Oh well, at least I still have memories when things like that were real and were really good and had a lot of “fat” in them. Say, now I'm getting hungry, I think I'll make some fresh orange juice and make a lard sandwich. Take that you "fat free" people!!!  L K J