Clementines

At last it's November! What could be so exciting in this usually bleak month? The month of enforced butchery and cooking of farm-raised, genetically engineered turkey served with stuffing from a box? Why, it's the official start of citrus season!

I am intimately acquainted with citrus, having once slaved at a public relations agency on an account that was, shall we say, juicy? (I won't name names, but I did get to have a moment in which Lauren Bacall said to me, "Lighting is everything, kid." and I never forgot it. I'll let you run the Google search to connect the dots). The other perk of this particular experience is that I know when to buy oranges (starting now through May) and in what order they generally appear (November/December for clementines and tangerines, January for larger eating oranges/February look for those ugly Mineolas, they are delicious).

Because of my training, I have an almost Pavlovian response in the produce section when citrus season hits. The first sign to cause salivation this year were bags of clementine oranges from California. Usually, clementines are imported from Spain or Morocco, but they are raised domestically. The first time I had them was on an off-season November trip to France, about a decade ago. They glowed in the early evening dark of the outdoor fruit market, like small flames. Even the taste was radiant, the juice shielding me against the biting, energy draining, damp air of the pale grey city I was at pains to part with. I took a bag of clementines on the airplane home with me, promising my sister, Maris, I'd eat them all before we reached customs. I did. And she was glad I had them, along with cheese, because even French plane food is still plane food.

My two-and-a-half-year-old son, Bartleby, is monkey-like in his love of fruit. He has never met a fruit he doesn't like and started begging for a clementine at the first sight of the bag. I peeled one and gave it to him in a bowl, his preferred vessel for eating everything. He ate the slices, asked for another orange and then launched into one of his William Carlos Williams-meets Juila Child- poem speeches about food (wonder where he gets that from?). It went like this:

"These are called
Orange slices.
And I am going to put them
right here,
so,
I can have them.
Wow.
That's a lot of orange."

It was more thrilling than standing next to Lauren Bacall.

For more information on clementines and the seasons for other citrus fruit, check out Produce Pete's website.