Orange juice comes in a carton back
home. Not so in Portugal, where orange juice comes inside nice round
fresh oranges.
On Day one in Portugal we picked up
some groceries, and out of habit got a bottle of OJ for breakfast at
the store. Uck, it wasn't orange juice, it was some sort of 'Tang'
stuff. We did find some better tasting stuff later on, but it was
only a while before we discovered that the reason there is no orange
juice in the stores is because you can buy the oranges themselves and
make your own juice. We knew the oranges at the market were good,
because we had bought a few to eat, picking out the good ones from
the various vendors at the market. Then Colin mentioned that he
bought oranges in bulk at the market to squeeze for juice. He
suggested not worrying about which ones looked the best, because even
the little ones with blemishes made delicious juice. We discovered
you could buy 5 kilos of oranges for 2 Euro.
 | |
| Now that's OJ! |
The oranges here are not like Florida
oranges which have been developed with a thick skin so they can be
shipped North to us cold “Freezing in the dark” Canadians,
without bruising. The oranges here have almost no skin, and the juice
oranges have almost no pulp. When you squeeze them on the juicer, you
have to be careful or you tear the skin, and when you are done, you
have just the skin left – all juice.
I have become the Juice man. I squeezed
the first batch, and it became my task every day to make sure juice
was squeezed for our breakfast. Some days I'd get up early and make
REALLY fresh squeezed juice. This was the way I preferred it; fresh
and room temperature, but some members of the party commented that
they liked their juice chilled. I started either processing the
oranges in the evening and putting a pitcher of juice in the fridge
for morning, or I would put five oranges in the fridge and squeeze
cold oranges for fresh juice in the morning.
Just when we thought we had the old OJ
thing all cased, we got the car and drove down the coast. Using my
new Bionic peripheral vision I spotted Oranges on the side of the
road. Spaced out along a section of the road were tiny little stands
selling bags of oranges. Here we could get the nice big oranges for
the same price as the little ones, and they were even better for
juice. You got a big glass of juice from each orange you squeezed.
Oh, the best thing, as the official
“Orange Juicer”, I got to get the biggest glass of juice every
morning.
