I don't know why, but for the longest time I actually "forgot" about oranges. I'd buy them once a year, when the little Christmas mandarins came out, and then completely bypass the normal naval oranges in the fruit aisle for the rest of the year. They were dead to me. It was like they weren't even there.

When we moved here, our fruit selection became limited. Not because you can't find normal types of fruit, but because of the cost and quality. I'm now at the point where I'll pay for my 0.99 apples without making snide comments under my breath, but Kurt's allergic to apples so I knew we needed to branch out into the other, potentially more costly, types of fruit. Pineapple was out. Watermelon was out...$10.99 for a 1/4 of a watermelon seemed a TAD ridiculous, don't you think? Plus, I hate watermelon. Kurt's allergic to kiwis, pears, peaches, nectarines, plums...pretty much all the fruit I love. I could buy them for myself, of course, but they actually don't seem to fare well on their long commute to the island and show up looking pretty ghastly most of the time...like something you'd find on the ground in an orchard AFTER they'd picked all the good ones. We'd buy the occasional grapefruit, and about a month ago, as I was bagging up a few ruby reds, I noticed a big, beautiful pile of naval oranges sitting right next to them. At 0.99 each, they beat most of the other fruit in the price department and they looked like they were in OK shape, so we gave them a go.

Can I just say...I LOVE oranges. They are delicious, and good for you too. We now buy 10 every week and each take one in our lunches every day. It's solved the problem of Kurt's formerly fruitless existence and added a nutritious snack for me so I don't get bored with the old Granny Smiths.

However...they are not without their issues.

First off, they are a labour-intensive fruit. I would put them somewhere in the realm of a pomegranate or perhaps some types of melons, as far as the amount of time you need to put into the fruit before being able to eat it. They require a certain level of commitment which an apple does not (this might actually explain why I'm a cat person instead of a dog person. Dogs are the oranges of pets). The peel always gets under your fingernails, you normally get some of that powerful peel juice in your eye, and then there's the white stuff which I KNOW IS GOOD FOR ME but which I would rather not eat anyways because it's not nice to look at and gets stuck in my teeth.

Secondly, you go through the whole process of peeling and preparing your orange and go to take your first bite...only to find that a certain percentage of the time, the orange is crap. They can be dry (the worst), or tasteless, or too sweet, or can be totally rotten without any indication of this on the outside. Oranges are a crapshoot. You never know whether your investment is going to pay off or bite you in the ass. I've been lucky enough to only have come across one or two bad ones in the weeks we've been buying them, so we'll continue to fork out the dough and buy them as long as they're in season.