Now is the time for sensational blood oranges to be available in supermarkets, so take my advice and get over the weirdness you may feel about the name, and try one. 

Aside from the fabulous red orange juice they produce, blood oranges are a wonderful eating orange. They can also be used in all sorts of recipes that could be good candidates to include in a recipe collection or a family cookbook.

A long time ago I had a blood orange tree that would bear lots of fruit around this time of year. With much pampering (and a makeshift greenhouse featuring spotlights and heaters), it thrived during the winter and produced an exceptional amount of fruit.
 
One year another abundant blood orange crop was ready, so I went to collect some of our rosy orange and red-skinned bounty. There were quite a few blood oranges on the tree, and we anticipated a glorious pitcher of tart, sweet, Sangria-flavored blood orange juice, perhaps punctuated by a splash of spirits.

I began the harvest in earnest, only to discover that the blood oranges that appeared to be hanging from the tree had already been eaten!  We’d been robbed! A varmint, presumably a rat, raccoon or opossum, had already helped itself to ALL the blood oranges, and had left the blood orange peelings as a decoy, like so many pretty-colored ornaments!  What audacity and deceit!

We put an end to that sort of blood orange thievery, however, by adopting a few feral cats. The next year and several years after that, we did reap decent blood orange harvests.  Some years there were still so many blood oranges (even after sharing copiously with friends and neighbors), that I resorted to making blood orange recipes.

One year I got ambitious and made blood orange marmalade, which is very nice when bits of the blood orange skin are included. Also, a very delicious blood orange curd can be made using a lemon curd recipe and cutting down on the sugar. Blood orange curd is a fabulous filling for pound cake slices topped with Cool Whip, or just eaten on bread like jam.

In recent years, blood oranges have become the darling of trendy boutique restaurants for granitas, mimosas, tarts and other delicacies. They also pay handsomely for organic blood oranges.  Gee, another opportunity to have sold my little harvest of blood oranges for a nice tidy sum and retired. But then again, I wouldn’t have created my cookbook software for you and met such nice people in the cookbook-making world.

Happy cookbooking,

Matilda

Making a recipe book? Check out all the recipe software and cookbook binding supplies we have at CookbookPeople.com.

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