Tag: fruitcandy

Cold Candied Oranges

Glazed orange with strips of peel removed sits in a shallow crystal bowl on a blue background
Sunshine in the rain, friends. Sunshine in the rain.

Yesterday was SHITTY.

It doesn’t really matter which day “yesterday” actually was because, let’s face it, no one really knows what day it is, and if they say they do they are a bald-faced liar.

But yesterday. Woke up with another headache, many weeks straight, anxiety, overall fogginess in my whole body and brain. I was glutened accidentally a couple of days ago, and this accounts for some of it, but I think the general medical term for what I am experiencing is malaise.

I, and many all around the globe, are suffering from malaise: a general feeling of unwellness or discomfort whose cause is not possible to identify.

Yesterday seemed to be the culmination of a long-building malaise. The simplest of tasks were challenging, like swimming through pudding.

I have no solutions. I have no quick fixes. I did the long walk, I taught the yoga class, I hydrated like a motherfucker. I ate well. I took meds – prescription and CBD and allergy meds.

Today?

Today I feel a little better.

I am not going to say that these oranges were the thing that helped, but they certainly did not hurt. Long-time readers of this blog will recall my uneasy truce with citrus (my grandmother is now 101), but I actually went out and bought oranges on purpose for this use.

Correction: I bought them online, and Octavius from Giant on 41st, as wonderful a person as ever walked the earth, put them in my car.

This is not my recipe, these cold, candied oranges. This recipe belongs to The New York Times. Because they sometimes have an annoying paywall, I am going to go ahead and write things out here (copy/paste, actually). I cut the recipe in half because I cannot eat six of these, and even still I will give two away.

But my goodness. The orange, encased in a festively striped peel with the stained glass orange flesh peeking through, becomes plasma inside – not liquid, not solid. The peel keeps a satisfying chew, but the orange itself becomes Something Other, rising above its pedestrian squirty self. The flavor stays true to the orange, and once you’re done eating the orange itself, you’re left with a delicious orange simple syrup for the best old-fashioned you may ever drink.

Get at it. Can’t hurt.

Cold Candied Oranges

Ingredients

6 firm, juicy, seedless oranges with thin skins (Cara Cara oranges), no bigger than a baseball
6 cups granulated sugar

Preparation

  1. Bring a stainless-steel pot of water to a boil. (It should be large enough to hold the oranges submerged.)
  2. Wash and dry the oranges, and channel from stem to navel at 1/2-inch intervals, removing strips of peel while leaving the pith intact, until the oranges resemble those onion domes on Russian churches. (Suzannah’s note: I had no idea what a channeler was, but I actually had one in the drawer in my kitchen. I don’t know that you could substitute any other tool, but I suppose you could try).
  3. Place the oranges and their long, fat threads of channeled peel into the boiling water, and reduce to a simmer. Cover the oranges with a lid one size too small for the pot, to keep them submerged. Let them blanch for about 25 minutes to remove the harshest edge of their bitter nature. They should swell and soften but not collapse or split. (Suzannah’s note: SIMMER. Not rolling boil. They will split)
  4. Remove the oranges and zest from the simmering water with a slotted spoon, and set aside. Dump out the blanching water, and return the dry pot to the stove.
  5. In that same pot, combine the sugar with 6 cups water; bring the sugar water to a boil over medium-high, stirring until the sugar has dissolved, then allow to gently boil, and reduce for 10 minutes, uncovered. You want some water to evaporate and for the syrup to take on a little body.
  6. Carefully place blanched oranges and zest into the sugar syrup, and reduce heat to a very slow, lethargic simmer. Cover oranges with a parchment circle cut slightly larger than the circumference of the pot (by 1 inch is enough), then place the too-small lid on top of the parchment on top of the oranges, to keep them fully submerged (and sealed under the parchment) in the sluggishly simmering syrup.
  7. Cook the oranges in the syrup for about 45 minutes, checking on them frequently to keep the temperature quite slow and stable, until they take on a high gloss and appear vaguely translucent and jewel-like. (We have several induction burners that come with features that can hold a temperature, and I leave the oranges at around 170 degrees for most of the candying, sometimes with a little bump up to 180. But without a thermometer or an induction burner, just a visual slow, slow, slow bubble is a good cue.)(Suzannah’s note: I clipped a candy thermometer to the edge of the pot and watched the temp)
  8. Cool oranges and peels in their syrup for a full 24 hours before serving. This kind of “cures” them. They get even better after 48 hours. First, you’ll want to let them cool at room temperature until no longer warm to the touch, at least 4 hours, then refrigerate them until thoroughly chilled. The oranges last refrigerated for 1 month as long as they are submerged in that syrup.
  9. Serve very cold. Eat the whole thing, skin and all, with a knife and fork. It’s like a half glacéed fruit and half fresh fruit — refreshing, tonic, digestive and so great after dinner.

What helps your malaise?

Sunshine In The Rain: Candied Oranges

Pilfered produce. Felonious fruit.
Pilfered produce. Felonious fruit.

My grandmother is 97, and she steals fruit and vegetables from the cafeteria and gardens of her assisted living facility.

Perhaps I should backtrack a bit, lest you get the wrong idea.

My grandmother is, in truth, 97. I am not going to add that “years young” bullshit. Irene Kalman is 97. Sharp and witty and mentally all there but still every bit of 97 with Meuniere’s disease and vertigo and odd, fussy habits that the elderly seem to develop. She gets dizzy if she stands up too quickly and has recently conceded to a walker, only to store her keys and various bits and bobs that she travels around the facility with.

When The Teenager and I visit, she talks about being surrounded by “old people.” Obvi, she does not number herself among their ranks.

Every day she gets up and does her hair and puts on makeup. Her hair is that particular kind of spun white floss that envelops her skull like clouds and I always want to touch it but I don’t because #boundaries.

She wears sweaters from 1982 and shoes that may be at least as old as I am (44, if we are keeping track. Forty-five on March 14th, and, yes, appropriate tributes are accepted. #PleaseAndThankYou).

Our visits are always the same. We update her about all of the things we are doing, keeping the more challenging or troubling times out of our narrative and focusing on how busy, active, and healthy we are (even if that means we left the cheese off our tortilla chips when we sat on the couch and watched football all day). My grandmother has that Depression-era peculiarity of dwelling on bad news and glossing over it, concurrently. You wouldn’t think this was possible, but don’t get her started on the Dust Bowl or cooking when you have no money.

We avoid this tendency to fret by ignoring troubling topics and keeping everything light. Sometimes it’s unavoidable though, like The Unfortunate Time My Husband Died and The Fact That Donald Trump Exists In The World. When this happens, we shake our heads ruefully together and bemoan the fates while looking resolutely towards the future. There is no dwelling, although my grandmother and I are Champion Worriers, so we each of us dwell in our own private ways later. #SleepingPillsForHer #AnxietyMedsForMe

I think the hardest thing for my grandmother is the fact that she cannot really extend the basic hospitality of feeding her guests. When I was growing up, the main feature of a visit to grandma’s was the food. Fried chicken, lasagna, even once a homemade struedel that took up the entire table in the making. My grandmother is an excellent cook, both personally and professionally, and I think it pains her to be able to offer nothing to those who come to visit.

So she steals fruit from the cafeteria, hoarding it in her room until she has a guest, at which point she unloads her bounty on them, concealing it with wadded up grocery bags so the people who aren’t watching and don’t care won’t catch her.

I figured out awhile ago that this makes her feel good, so I accept whatever she wants to give me.

Unfortunately, this means that I often return home with a thousand navel oranges in the winter.

Citrus and I have an uneven relationship. I don’t even quite regard it as a food, which haz the dumb, I know, but it seems so…liquid. Great as a garnish or in a glass with champagne.

I will occasionally eat an entire box of clementines, mostly because I can’t get over how easy they are to peel and I don’t want to waste.

But still.

This past visit sent us home with ten oranges. And no juicer. And no one in this house who wants to peel them.

But guess what? CANDY. Orangettes, to be precise. Orangettes dipped in dark chocolate, even better.

The next time I visit my grandmother, I will tell her that we ate each one of the oranges and they were so sweet that it was just like candy.

Orangettes

Ingredients

3 cups simple syrup (DIY: combine a one-to-one ratio of sugar and water)

ten oranges, sliced into 1/4″ rounds and then cut in half

Optional: more sugar

Optional: melted chocolate

Method

Bring simple syrup to a low boil. Place oranges in the syrup and simmer for 30-45 minutes. You are looking for a slightly translucent flesh and the pith to be heading that way, too.

Remove from syrup and transfer to a cooling rack placed on a cookie sheet. Place in a 200 degree oven for 30 minutes or so, just until the orange peel is dry and the flesh feels a little tacky. You should certainly flip them over halfway, and no one would fault you for trying one at this stage. Turn off the oven and let cool, or keep them in there overnight.

At this point, you can toss in sugar, leave as they are, or dip in melted chocolate. I like to toss them in sugar and then dip them in bittersweet chocolate because DELICIOUS.

 

 

 

 

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