Farmers’ markets aside, an awful lot of produce isn’t what it used to be–either for vitamins or flavor. Anytime you get to major mass production and long storage times, you know the result is going to be a product that looks like fresh fruit or vegetables but the smell, taste and texture are really missing. Kind of like the long-stemmed red roses bred to last for the Valentine’s Day bouquets–pretty, hardy as hell, but with almost no perfume at all.
Case in point: the Cutie ™ seedless tangerine. About two weeks ago I bought a 3-lb. bag of these things for a congregational hike and Tu Bi’Shevat ceremony in honor of the New Year of Trees, usually in January around the time when almond trees are in blossom in Israel (and California, though that’s a little less official).
The ceremony, other than the basic blessings for the gift of trees and their fruit, is kabbalistic in origin and involves celebrating the different kinds of fruit and tree nuts as a metaphor for different levels of openness and freedom in the soul. Some fruits have a hard stone at their core, others an inedible peel or shell, and the most open and enlightened are fully edible. A full-out Tu Bi’Shevat seder includes a selection of these fruits and nuts in progression from least to most edible, along with four cups of wine or grape juice mixed in four combinations from white to red (or is it the other way around?) to symbolize the approach of spring among other things. I’m not a kabbalist (my family were always “misnageders” or skeptics/rationalists rather than Hasidim) but I can appreciate the poetry of the Tu Bi’Shvat seder.
My family, skeptical or not, also always appreciated a good geschichte (shaggy dog story, preferably minus the actual dog and its hair). So I’m painfully aware you may not think you’ve been hearing enough about Cuties for the past few minutes to make this worth your while. I’m trying here.
My husband came back from the hike with at least half the bag of Cuties uneaten, so I put them in a bowl on the counter and started serving them, hoping to use them up before they went rotten. Because I’m not sure a seedless rotten tangerine is an improvement on the regular kind. Also because our neighbors with a satsuma tree (seeded) had just gifted my daughter with a bag of those. Out here in LA, tangerines are the winter version of zucchini.
Cuties are little and orange and shiny and really easy to peel. Perfect, right? The trouble was, the Cuties had almost no taste. At all. Continue reading
Filed under: cooking, DASH Diet, Desserts, frugality, fruits, Microwave tricks | Tagged: citrus, Cuties, Desserts, frugal living, fruit recipes, microwave cooking, salads, tangerines | 2 Comments »
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