Orange You Glad You Didn’t Throw Out Your Citrus?

’Tis the season for big bowls of oranges on side tables, where you can easily reach and peel and eat one while you’re reading a book by the fire or drinking cocktails in the living room before a dinner party.

All different shapes and varieties of oranges are arriving at grocery and specialty stores now — and many of those oranges will be dry and tasteless with thick, pithy skins.

Don’t despair. If you decide not to eat those unexceptional oranges, you also have a month in which to convert them into holiday season decorations that are festive and fragrant.

I associate oranges at this time of year with Victorian England — but also with my Asian relatives, who keep bowls of satsuma or tangerines or clementines in bowls on tables all around the house in winter. Why not? They’re tasty, healthy and hydrating — certainly more so than cookies and eggnog.

According to national citrus growing association websites, this year’s citrus crops (oranges and lemons) is the smallest it’s been since the 1940s, with the exception of four years ago when Hurricane Irma destroyed the crop.

There doesn’t seem to be a single factor involved in this year’s low numbers, but that’s not really what this article is about anyway.

I have already made up one batch of clove-studded oranges, mainly because I bought a bag of navel oranges that turned out to be too dry to eat. In the past I’ve tried to just poke the cloves into the thick orange skins and have had only moderate success. This year I figured out that I can cut the design into the skin of the orange with a small, sharp knife. Drawing on the design with a waterproof pen first is even better — but if you do that, you won’t be able to dunk your cloved orange in tea or hot cider.

For the first few days, the cloves and oranges have a lovely mild scent. But after a couple weeks, as the slices into the fruit widen, the scent becomes so rich that you’ll wonder if someone snuck the most gorgeous citrus incense into your house.

As the weeks progress, your oranges should dry out enough that you can use them as ornaments on your holiday tree (they weigh less as they lose their juice).

You can also make a wreath to stretch across your fireplace mantel.

If you want to try either of these projects, be sure to run a barbecue skewer from top to bottom through the fruit, so you can then put string or florist wire through the center. Once the fruit has dried out, it will be too hard to pierce.

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You can also cut your orange into quarter-inch slices and dehydrate them in your oven (200 degrees for four or five hours; flip them several times during the baking period).

You can then poke yarn or a sturdy twine through the top of each slice to make a garland. Alternate cinnamon sticks  with the citrus slices, and maybe use one of the (heavier) clove-studded oranges in the center.

My newest orange craft is edible and comes (as is so often the case) from the internet. The website www.downshiftology.com by Lisa Bryan has a recipe for chocolate-dipped orange peel that I’ve now made twice. It’s super easy.

Take an orange and with a sharp knife peel off the orange outer skin, leaving behind as much white pith as you can. I usually go back after the first round of peeling and gently slice away as much remaining white pith as possible.

Then cut your orange peel into strips. I like mine super thin, but most people make them 1/4 inch wide, maybe a little wider.

Put your slices in a small pot and cover them with water. Bring to a boil. Drain out the water and cover the peels again with fresh water. Bring to a boil again and drain off the water again.

Then take modified simple syrup: two parts water to one part sugar (for example, two cups of water and one cup of sugar). Bring to a boil, stirring to help the sugar dissolve. Add in your orange peel and bring it to a boil, then simmer it for 30 minutes. You can add in some ginger or a vanilla bean for extra flavor.

Meanwhile, line a baking sheet with parchment paper and lay a roasting rack on top. After the peels have simmered for 30 minutes, lift them with tongs from the simple syrup and lay them on the roasting rack. They’ll clump up and fall through, but don’t worry, it’s fine.

Let them sit for a minimum of eight hours but ideally for as long as 24 hours. Prepare a bowl or a jar with some sugar. I used an unprocessed natural sugar, and you can use a fancy sugar but white processed sugar will be fine. Roll the orange peel in the sugar; I put my peels right in the jar with the sugar and shook them up every few hours for the first day. This seems to distribute the sugar over them neatly.

And then what do you do with the peels? They smell great and they taste amazing. Because mine are so thin, I use them as a garnish on mashed sweet potatoes. You can also dip them in melted chocolate once they’ve been coated with sugar, and eat them as candy.

Of course you can also add them to your traditional holiday fruitcake!

It’s not a super practical food project, but again it’s easy and it’s a good way to use up your surplus oranges.

Photo by Cynthia Hochswender

Photo by Cynthia Hochswender