I love oranges. Sometimes I’ll stand over the kitchen sink and eat several (seven is my record) until my lips are burning and I’m reeling from a citrus high. Orange season runs from November through April. You can find softball-sized navels on sale at the grocer’s now because, as the season is ending, growers are trying to empty their warehouses. Yesterday, as I was picking up two eight-pound bags of navels on sale at my neighborhood Safeway, I was surprised by the sight of bagged oranges marketed by Disney. The same Disney that gave us Pinocchio and Little Mermaid is now giving us fruit? I was confounded. Mind you, I’ve bought oranges in abundance for years and have never seen Disney-branded fruit. Their bag of oranges is blazoned with big bright illustrations of Little Nemo cartoon characters.

I’d have thought the media would have made a fuss about this. In these days of ultra-corporatization, I guess Disney fruit doesn’t make much of a story. But it gives me pause, mainly because I’m suspicious of huge corporations taking over any and everything. My father grew up in California’s San Joaquin valley, where most of America’s produce comes from. He lived amid the orange groves in the days before mega-farming. For a time, I lived there too. I loved the sweet pungent stink of rotting oranges from the groves. Come spring, pink-white orange blossoms rain from the trees like blizzard snow. On cold winter nights, the wind machines—airplane propellers mounted on tall poles– chatter over the groves, churning the air to keep the freeze off the fruit. In my father’s days, farmhands would light smudge pots in the fields, filling the groves with smoke to fight the freeze.

My grandmother worked in the packing houses until she was 72, grading oranges on the line eight hours a day, five days a week. She’d wear a sweater against the warehouse chill, and white cotton gloves to save her fingers. She sorted oranges according to size, sending the too-small or mushy ones either to be juiced or pulped (for animal feed or fertilizer). She often had a box of the best navel oranges on her porch. After graduating from college, I lived with her for a while and ate oranges every day. Now, nearly every time I pick one up, it reminds me of her and her hard-scrabble life.

The orange we’re familiar with was originally called the “sweet orange” or “China orange.” Yes, it originated in China or India, though nobody can say for certain where exactly. Early explorers –Persians and Arabs—brought it west. By the 1500s, Italians and Spaniards were cultivating it. The Spanish got rich trading oranges with their Northern neighbors in the 1600-1700s. The Spanish brought the China orange to California, maybe as early as the 1600s. California now produces the best orange in the world. If you don’t believe this, set a California navel next to, say, a Florida navel and take a look. Then take a taste. No contest. The irony of California’s supremacy is that it now ships about 20 million boxes of oranges to Asia annually. That includes China.

For the longest time, the orange was a luxury item, a rare and costly fruit imported from far-eastern lands. Here in the U.S., the orange remained a costly item until transcontinental railroads and well-maintained highways made it more accessible and more affordable—circa the 1920s. Before it became a common grocery store item, it would show up as a Christmas treat, because that’s when the orange was most abundant and easily obtained. Whenever nineteenth century novels describe Christmas, they inevitably mention the orange in a stocking or as dessert.

Apparently, the Disney corporation has been branding oranges and other produce with cartoon characters since 2006. Said a spokesperson, “This new and innovative joint venture with Disney and our supplier is a great way to harness pester power and use it to get kids eating more healthily.” It appears that Disney doesn’t own any orange farms, rather the company partner with certain growers to market their brand. I found a website discussion that talked of Disney’s recent venture. Said one consumer: “As much as I don’t the like Disney corp., whatever gets kids to eat fruits and veggies is a plus in my book. better than teaming up for happy meals.” Said another, “People need to realize they just need to go down to the local market or farmers market to get healthy food. If they live by the Disney name for their choice of healthy food, they are idiots!”

One participant announced that, in Spain, Disney markets hamburger shaped like Mickey Mouse’s head. Another recalled drinking Donald Duck orange juice as a kid. I remember it too. Also noodles with Popeye the Sailor on the box. Kellogg’s corn flakes always had a sports star on the box. So what am I complaining about? Celebrity endorsements have been around for over a hundred years. They’re integral to our culture, for better or worse. Still, I’m attracted to the less flashy unknown brands—and modest packaging that reminds me of the seemingly simpler times. Most oranges still come that way, in part because oranges don’t need flash. They are already flashy, God bless them.

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Jill and I are racing to our house-rehab deadline. As usual, I was overly ambitious when I submitted another historic tax credit rehab project proposal two years ago. Oh, the things I said I would do! Replace the roof, fix the garage (whose roof was caving in), finish the porch, finish the pantry, on and on. If you’ve been reading this blog a while, you’ll notice that it seems I’m always racing to a deadline. This comes of my being an eternal and thoroughly unrealistic optimist. Every time I eye a prospective project, I image finishing it in three days instead of nine or one week instead of three. We’ve been working on the pantry – a tiny four-by-thirteen-foot room – for months.

What happens is this: we try something new, like tiling the pantry wall above the new counter. Then we like what we’ve done so much, we conclude that we have to do the same to the other wall. Then the pantry’s looking so good, we figure we’ve got to refinish the floor too. Then, as I’m refinishing the floor, I notice that we never did finish the wall under the pantry sink. And so on.

We’ve had Will helping us. He finished the floor on the second-story porch, which came out great. Some of you have asked about Will’s broken tooth. The pocketful of cash I loaned him for the extraction was too big a temptation. I should have known. Sometimes he asks me to hold his earnings until the weekend has passed. There are, let us say, too many distractions when he’s not working. Which explains, in part, why he’s working all the time.

When I saw him the day after his dentist appointment, Will just shook his head sadly.

“You didn’t go?” I asked.

“No, Mister Ron, I didn’t.”

“The money’s gone?”

“All gone.”

“What happened?”

“Sometimes, you know, I meet a girl. You got to treat her right, you know. Before I know it, my money’s long gone.” He shrugged and shook his head again. “Sorry.”

I shrugged too.

Will has since worked off that debt. I tell him it looks like we’ll have to go to the dentist’s together. Maybe Jill will join us. It’ll be a field trip.

Jill and I are celebrating her having passed her Ph.D. exams. I’m proud of her. She’s an outstanding student (on full scholarship) but I can’t stand to watch the way she studies because she puts everything off till the last minute, often pulling all nighters to get the assignment done. It’s good to have her back finally. Good also to have her help with the house. She’s the painting and detail expert. She’s also the taskmaster and very dangerous to take to a salvage warehouse. We drove to North Carolina for an early Thanksgiving a couple of weeks ago and stopped at Governor’s antique building supplies in Mechanicsville, Virginia. I thought I was safe – we didn’t have much time to shop and we couldn’t take anything big because we didn’t have Jill’s SUV. But Jill found these really cool wrought iron light sconces for our front stoop. And two cool glass globes to go with them. So there I was, walking to the car with a smoking wallet and yet another project. It’s going to be nearly impossible to mount those sconces to our building. For starters, I’ll have to drill through five inches of stone, then a wall of brick. Watch for news of that attempt in the next few weeks.

Jill and I reminisced the other day about our Cincinnati Thanksgiving. A few years ago, Tom and Dorothy — her father and stepmom – invited us to make them Thanksgiving dinner at their house in Cincinnati. We immediately agreed, picturing a quiet, cozy dinner. We sent them a shopping list and expected everything to be in order when we arrived. We discovered that they had put the turkey in their fridge, as we had instructed. But the turkey was frozen. And it was now six p.m. Thanksgiving eve. We learned also that Dorothy had moved the festivities to her pizza restaurant, a franchise she co-owned with one of her sons. the restaurant would be closed and we’d have it all to ourselves. But it wasn’t going to be the four of us. About twenty other family members would be joining us, Dorothy announced. “About twenty?” I crokaed, glancing sharply to Jill, who only blinked at me and shrugged.

“It’ll be great,” Dorothy continued. “You’ll have a whole professional kitchen to yourself!”

I had never cooked in a professional kitchen. Could be fun, I thought.

Tom opened the freezer drawer and pulled out a pack of green beans. “We got green beans!”

Dear man, he wasn’t joking. Two hours later, Jill and I returned from the grocery store with six bags of food. We had the turkey immersed in warm water in the sink. “Is that going to be all right?” Dorothy worried over my shoulder as I checked the very frozen bird. She meant, would we die of food poisoning if we left the turkey out all night? Later, in the guest room, I moanaed to Jill: “If we ruin this dinner, we’ll taking the blame. Doesn’t matter that Mom and Pop are poor planners.” Jill got up at six the next morning and started peeling potatoes.

She and I had learned not to tell anybody there was butter – lots of butter — in them. We were in a margarine household. “Transfat alert!” I joked. Whenever Dorothy or Tom drifted through the kitchen, I shoved the butter behind a pot or covered it with a lid. We had bought two pounds of butter. There’d be butter in and on everything.

At ten, we put in the turkey. “This won’t be ready until about five,” I warned.

Dorothy waved away my concern. “We’ll be fine.”

Jill asked what time she had told everyone to arrive at the restaurant.

“Four o’clock!” Dorothy chirped. “But we won’t be ready,” I insisted.

“Oh, that’s fine,” Dorothy continued. “We always gather at four.” Again I exchanged a bug-eyed What-the-hell? expression with Jill.

We cooked hard. All day. Four o’clock came and went. We pulled the turkey out at five. To our profound dismay, we discovered that there was hardly any fat in the turkey pan. Was this a special-order fatless bird? We’d have to improvise. At five-thirty, we sent Tom and Dorothy to the restaurant with the bird and the stuffing. Jill and I stayed behind to make the gravy and finish the potatoes and make the salad. I don’t recall everything we put in the gravy-that-wasn’t-gravy. The turkey butt, chicken broth, Worcester sauce, all kinds of odds and ends from the pantry. We tested and tasted and tested some more. Finally, at six-thirty, we gave up and took what we had to the restaurant, which was a forty minute drive. We had three pies on the back seat, the potatoes in a pot on the rear floor, in the company of yams, beans, and salad. Jill held the steaming pot of gravy on the floor, braced with her ankles. I took a corner too fast and a cupful of hot gravy doused Jill’s right foot. “Everybody’s gonna hate us,” I groused. Jill dabbed at her soggy shoe with a paper towel. She said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

When we arrived at Pizza-Fest, we learned that the children had already eaten two hours earlier. All the pizza they’d wanted. We also learned that, since this was a pizza franchise, its kitchen was equipped only with a single large pizza oven that was no higher and no wider than a pizza pan. There was no stove top and no conventional oven. The“cooks” would set the pizza on a conveyor belt and the belt would run the pizza through fifteen minutes of heating in the custom oven. “Why didn’t anybody warn us?” I growled at Jill. The mashed potatoes, the yams, the green beans, the stuffing (one of Jill’s specialties), and the turkey –- all of it we spread out on pizza pans and ran through the oven. As we awaited dinner, I discovered happily that Pizza-fest had wine. I filled a water glass with it. One of the teenagers said to Jill and me, “Don’t worry. This happens every year.” I poured another glass.

In the end, the company was pleasant and the food, despite the setbacks, was good. Okay, the gravy was a disaster. But nobody died of food poisoning. And Jill and I derived considerable satisfaction in seeing the diet-conscious grown-ups down those buttery potatoes.

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When Jill and I get too busy to cook – as we have lately — we grill cheese sandwiches for our evening meal. You can have a sandwich in the pan within minutes, then browned and steaming on your plate within ten. It’s so quick and easy, it hardly qualifies as cooking. But it’s a homey, filling, thoroughly satisfying meal (I like it with a salad on the side).

As a child, the only grilled cheese sandwich I knew was American processed cheese food on white bread lightly browned in a skillet, usually with margarine. My mother always added mayonnaise to the cheese. Mayo gives it a kick and I still use it to this day. In college, I tried grilled Swiss cheese sandwiches, then cheddar, and then it seemed there was no limit to the variations. What cheese wouldn’t taste good between two slices of grilled bread slathered with mayonnaise?

Nowadays Jill and I mix our cheeses. A heavenly combination is parmesan with imported provolone (repeat: imported -– it is sharp and wondrous and tastes nothing like the domestic provolone you’re thinking of). Also try parmesan with extra-sharp cheddar. Goat and feta. Feta and smoked mozzarella. Give it an added kick with a sprinkling of fresh oregano or rosemary. Or lay a few fresh basil leaves in there. And keep the mayonnaise.

Other variations: mix in a little Dijon mustard with the mayonnaise. Or make garlic mayonnaise (crush a clove of garlic in a cup of mayonnaise, then whip with a tablespoon of fresh lemon juice – oh my!). Yeah, I know, now we’re starting to get elaborate. But consider this: grill a sandwich with extra sharp cheese, then – hot out of the pan – open up the sandwich and slice on some ripe avocado. The creamy, nut-flavored avocado complements the tangy cheese.

Sometimes we go Italian and grill a sandwich with buffalo (i.e., fresh) mozzarella and feta or parmesan and a dollop of tomato sauce with a few fresh basil leaves and maybe a scatter of kalamata olives.

The grilled cheese sandwich that we know got its start, probably, in the 1920s, after the spread of two innovations: sliced bread and cheap eateries (most commonly called “diners”). Apparently, they were served open-faced, having been broiled. As a child, I loved a broiled cheese sandwich. The bubbly, browning cheese always seemed extra good. It’s hard to say when cooks started putting the top on the sandwich to make the treat we know so well today, but it seems to have been common by the 1950s. Nowadays I prefer the grilled cheese to the open-faced broiled cheese sandwich.

Technique is important for the best results. Like so: preheat your skillet, add a generous slice of butter (one fat slice per sandwich), then stir in a tablespoon of olive oil for extra flavor. I use thick-crust “rustic” Italian bread. For an extra crunchy sandwich, cook it over low heat. Cover the pan to make the cheese melt faster. I put on less cheese rather than more because I use really sharp cheese (imported provolone, fontinella, regiano, extra-sharp cheddar). Take your time. A good cheese sandwich doesn’t take long, but it can’t be rushed either. Above all, watch that heat.

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I’ve been making pizza for dinner nearly every night this week and last. I mean making it from scratch, trying to perfect my recipe. For twenty years I’ve been searching for the best recipe for home-made pizza. I started my quest when I was living in Iowa. That’s one of the reasons I couldn’t settle in the Midwest – it’s a pizza wasteland. Chicago pizza? I don’t think so.

My problem is this: I lived for a time just outside New York City – I’ve tasted America’s best pizza and I want nothing less than that greatness. It’s a Neopolitan-style pie, with a light tomato sauce (canned, crushed tomatoes is best), a sprinkling of fresh oregano, fresh mozzarella (the ultra-white wet kind you get at the deli counter, called “buffalo mozzarella,” which is really made from buffalo’s milk and is really native to Italy, where Goths brought buffalo six or seven hundred years ago), and – most important — a thin crunchy crust that’s somewhat blackened on the bottom and has big air bubbles rising through the sauce. Nothing’s better.

When I tell people I make my own pizza, they nod in admiration and admit that they’d never be so enterprising. I assure them that making your own dough is no big deal. I’ve come up with a recipe that can put a very good pizza on the table within two hours. Just fifteen minutes of that is preparing the dough. The finished product is light, airy, and crunchy. Almost like pastry. Guests give it high marks. But it’s not New York style.

I fed my brother Dave some of my pizza recently. He’s a fan. Chewing a piece, he held it up, eyed it with satisfaction, and said, “Alton Brown’s got the best recipe. You should check it out.” Alton Brown is a quirky chef on the Food Channel. Funny and smart, he explains really well why you should do things his way. But I didn’t have luck with his pizza recipe until I made a few changes.

The problem was the crust. It tasted too dry and cracker-like. Jill suggested taking the sugar out of the recipe. Don’t worry, yeast rises well without sugar. Flour itself is high in sugar (carbs). Also, I’d been using steel pans and well-seasoned cast iron pans for my pizzas. Alton Brown insists on a pizza stone. He’s right. For the New York crust, a stone is the way to go because it replicates the floor of a brick hearth. Alton brown lets his dough slow-rise in the fridge overnight. I let my new recipe slow-rise on the kitchen counter (oiled in a covered bowl and NOT in a warm place) for 6-8 hours. That means you make the dough in the morning. I like that better than making it the day before.

Jill was right about the sugar. It’s a leavener. Instead of helping the rise, it was hindering it somehow. Now, you may ask, why bother? why not go to the best local pizzeria and be done with it? I wish there were one good enough to warrant that kind of loyalty. If I lived in Brooklyn, I’m sure I’d never, or rarely, make pizza. As it is, I like having the ability to create a heart-stopping pizza whenever the urge hits. And the urge hits nearly every week.

I was five when I tasted my first pizza. My family was traveling through Norfolk, Virginia, not exactly the pizza capital of the world. I remember all of us waiting for Dad to return to the car with the pie, our dinner after a long day on the road. What is it? I kept asking. We were parked right in front of the pizzeria, a low white stucco building with a big plate glass window, through which you could see the t-shirted cooks tossing dough and shuffle-boarding pies into the oven. The glare of its lights illuminated the interior of our station wagon. When Dad opened the big white cardboard box, the smell of pepperoni filled my head. I had never smelled anything like it. A hot hammy aroma and so peppery it almost tingled in my nostrils.

Mom handed back a slice to each of us hungry boys. The first bite told me that life is full of surprises — goopy stringy cheese! salty-tart tomato sauce! wondrously sweet and spicy pepperoni! savory oniony oil! The possibilities of world opened before me and I knew that, if I managed to get my hands on this kind of food regularly, my life was going to be very good.

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Last night, Jill and I made our first apple pie of the season. I bought a big bag – thirty pounds – of mixed apples at the farmers’ market yesterday morning: jonogolds, ginger golds, granny smiths, galas, McIntosh, winesaps, and jonathans. Jill does the crust, I do the filling. She’s been making pies since she was a teenager – compelled, she says, by her mother’s terrible cooking. I’ve been making pies since college, first following my grandmother’s recipe for pan-fried apple turnovers.

When we’re feeling especially sinful, Jill and I will eat only a plate of salad for dinner, then finish with an entire apple pie. On occasion, I myself will eat an entire pie in a single sitting. Sometimes we make extra crust, sprinkling it with sugar and cinnamon before baking. This was something my grandmothers used to do. Both grandmothers were country cooks. They baked with butter and lard and never served a meal without a homemade dessert.

Apples are a near-perfect food, I’ve decided. They can quench a thirst and fill a stomach; they travel well and last long. They come in an astounding variety – 7,500 – and have been in the human diet since the time of cave-dwellers. But they are not native to the Americas (with the exception of crab apples). The Pilgrims brought the first apple seeds over. And it took a long while for the trees to flourish; in fact, it took the introduction of honey bees (the Indians called these “white men’s flies”) to make the orchards healthy.

Years ago, I was stranded at a small regional airport and found myself nearly dizzy from hunger. There happen to be one vending machine in the waiting area. Among its offerings was a large red apple. I’d never seen a vending machine that sold whole food like that. I deposited my coins, got the apple, and was amazed, nearly delirious with satisfaction, after the first, sweet, juice-spilling bite. Never had an apple tasted so good. Since that time, I’ve been fanatical about apples. I eat one or two, and sometimes three, every day. I seek out unusual varieties, like Baldwins, Priscillas, Daveys, and Bailey Sweets. Freida, our basset hound, is similarly enthusiastic about the fruit. They are her favorite food. She gets at a core a day and sometimes an entire apple. Here’s a link to a YouTube clip of Frieda eating an apple: Frieda’s apple.

As trick-or-treaters, my friends and I hated getting apples instead of candy. What spoil-sport, ninny-loving, fun-crushing, goody-two-shoes household would dispense apples when everyone else was handing out Baby Ruths and Milky Ways and Pay Days and Sugar Daddies and min-boxes of Good-n-Plenty? But, then, if somebody was handing out caramel apples or candied apples, man oh man, word would race prairie-fire fast through the neighborhood and there’d be a run on that house and then you’d hear about it all night, how that house was handing out candied or caramel apples but now they’re gone. To hell with the rumors of razor blades hidden inside, it’s not every day you’d get caramel or candied apples. Even now, if I have the chance to buy a candied apple, I do it.

Apples are so readily available, and travel so well, it seems a waste to eat those rubbery, barely digestible earlike bits of dried apple we find in the grocer’s bulk foods bins. Why bother? Actually, I confess that well after apple season – in late spring – the pickings aren’t so good on the apple shelf. Either we get apples that have been warehoused for months and taste it or we get the guilty pleasures from New Zealand and Chile. Guilty pleasure because, in buying these imports, we’re wasting too much fuel and expelling too much carbon. No apple, no matter how fresh, is worth the cost.

Sometimes I like nothing more than to stand among the piled-high apple tables at the farmers’ market and steep in the punky-sweet scent of apples. By the season’s end, I will have bought bushels and Jill and I will have baked apple betties, apple cobblers, apple sauce, apple strudels, apple dumplings, apple turnovers, apple cakes, apple muffins, and, of course, apple pies. God love an apple.

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