Are you ready for this? Make sure you've finished your meal. That you're not having any symptoms of nausea. When you feast your eyes on THIS, your stomach might want to refund.
You may recall that a Ponytail Guy has been bringing free food boxes to the Storage Units on Friday mornings. The last several weeks, the boxes have included produce, which we did not get earlier in the year. We have accumulated several weeks' worth of ORANGES. I like oranges. I'm not letting them go to waste. I have one every night after supper. Sometimes, I have one with lunch, also.
I peel them and eat them in sections. My mom's preferred way was to slice an orange in half, and suck on the sections for the pulp and juice. That's okay sometimes. But I like mine whole these days. They are navel oranges. Seedless.
Imagine my surprise when I looked at the orange The Pony had picked out to put on my supper tray. He warned me that it looked funny. Did I want him to throw it away? No siree, Bob! Take a gander for yourself:
That's quite a navel! Definitely an "innie." I know that some oranges have a navel that results in a mini orange at the bottom of the real orange. You know, when you peel it, there's another little ball of sections at the bottom of the sections. Sometimes you can eat them. Sometimes they're too pulpy.
Don't be frightened! I'm going to show you a closeup inside the navel! Still intact, but a closer view. My phone changed the tint, but you will see that it's the same orange.
Doesn't that look ominous? It's the coloring. Like something from a horror movie! A creature might burst forth! Or a warning poster about disease from the CDC!
Let the record show that I peeled the orange as normal, and ATE IT! I wish I had taken a picture of it without its skin, but the thought didn't occur to me at the time. It was like a regular orange, with a little bit larger "inside orange" at the bottom of the sections.
Here's the odd part. This orange had really thick white stuff that holds the peel to the sections. It was very hard to peel. After all that thickness came off, the orange was pretty small. The sections were hard to pull apart, and the fibrous covering of them peeled away with the next section, allowing juice to run out all willy-nilly. Still, the taste was good.
I am not averse to continuing to eat the Ponytail Guy's navel (oranges).
Too bad you included those parenthetical phrases. If you had not, this would have been quite a racy post.
ReplyDeleteI've seen oranges like that plenty of times. The "thick white stuff" is called 'pith' and the riper the orange is before being picked, the less pith there is. So this one was picked early and ripened artificially, like most fruits are these days. I like oranges, but they hurt my teeth and give me hives, so I don't eat them. You're welcome to my share.
ReplyDeleteSioux,
ReplyDeleteOf course I would NEVER put out a racy post, Madam! Just as that Ponytail Guy who's been giving me his meat for FREE for the past several months.
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River,
THAT explains all the pith! I will gladly eat your share. They just hurt the corners of my mouth. No hives.
Someone gave us a huge box of oranges and I gave away all I could manage to my tenants, then dug out my juicer and made orange juice. HeWho does not like oranges, I enjoyed all of it! Then the remains went into the compost bin and will soon be rich soil.
ReplyDeleteKathy,
ReplyDeleteI don't like orange juice, because it gives me heartburn. Regular oranges do not, so I eat them whole. Minus the skin and pith, of course!