A Little Sweet and Too Much Sour

Chapter Five of "Why I Saved Those Cookbooks"

Kumquats. Small but mighty.

People who lament that California has no seasons have never lived with a backyard orange tree.

Ours happens to live a few feet outside the kitchen window and every spring it bursts with blossoms, releasing a fragrance so sweet that if it were bottled, you’d take one sniff and say, oh, no, too sweet. But the scent floating through the window is perfect.

Then for about nine months – metaphor? – we fret about fruit formation, fertilizer, fruit drop, watering schedules, and those damn squirrels who show up late in the game to gnaw almost-ripe fruit. We release our jaunty terrier to do his territorial best, which is never fatal to any squirrels, rest assured, but they are deterred.

Then before we know it, it’s late December again and the oranges are as sweet as they can be and on Christmas morning, we enjoy what we like to believe are the world’s best mimosas.

Always a little sad to slice into the last orange of the season.

A bacchanal of orangeness follows for a couple weeks, although it’s just a semi-dwarf tree so we treasure each one. It’s about this time of year when I notice juicy but ignored oranges dangling over fences and walls all over Orange County and I can’t understand why everyone isn’t eating their oranges. Hello? It’s Orange County, people. I want to knock on doors and nag them about food waste and sing the praises of gleaning programs that serve the hungry. But I don’t have the nerve.

Then the bittersweet day arrives when nary an orange is left on our tree and our bleak winter sets in.

Cascade of Kumquats

For about a minute. Then we turn to the kumquats covering the shrub of a tree tucked into another corner of the yard. The olive-sized citrus fruits are tangy to downright tart, depending on the variety, so they’re not to everyone’s liking, but we pop them into our mouths like grapes, and routinely slice them up and marinate them in vinaigrette, where they mellow and transform into orange jewels we sprinkle on winter greens and salads.

It was in this seasonal shift that I decided to do something different with the kumquats and reached for a book I purchased years ago at a Friends of the Library book sale in the City of Orange, appropriately enough.

Alas, I’m sad to say it led us to our first recipe fail here at “Why I Saved Those Cookbooks.” Chicken Salad with Kumquats on page 59 of “The Best of Sunset Low-Fat Cook Book” looked like a nice light meal. It called for a generous amount of lemon juice, and we are fortunate to have lemon trees, too.

Note to Self: Follow the Recipe

Never mind that it required crystallized ginger, and that I was too lazy to dash out for what I thought was basically candy. Wouldn’t fresh ginger grated and mashed with a teaspoon of sugar do just as well?

Turns out, no it wouldn’t. This recipe hails from the ‘90s when fat was verboten but sugar not so much. (Raise your hand if you remember SnackWells.) Fish sauce lent umami to the dressing, but without even a drib-drab of olive oil, the salad needed that sugary blast of crystallized ginger to cut the acidity.

It’s so pretty. Pretty tart, that is.

We tried to appreciate the astringent zing, but after rushing to a mirror to see if we were in possession of any remaining tooth enamel, we decided it was a bust.

Why ever did I save that cookbook? Let’s blame the ‘90s and move on.

Food for Thought

No great loss, though. We’re fortunate to have more citrus to play with. I eye the kumquats and plan a citrusy chutney for goat cheese, the Lisbon lemons will go into pasta al limone, the pink lemonade lemons on a tree just coming of age will glam up my sparkling water. Who am I kidding? A gin and tonic, too. I am grateful for it all.

Which starts me thinking about all that seasonal fruit just hanging around town, ready and waiting. I’ve also noticed pomegranates and those precious little yellow limes left unharvested. None of it on its own will solve food insecurity, but it could be part of a bigger picture, it could open a door to understanding food insecurity. So much sweetness out there, ready and waiting. A bounty that could be shared.

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Cook’s Notes:

If you’re lucky to have an abundance of backyard produce at any time of year, nonprofit gleaning groups will harvest and deliver it to organizations serving people who are food insecure. There’s probably one near you.

My friend has an overachieving persimmon tree, but the nonprofit gleaning group near her, Share the Bounty, was happy to pick the produce and deliver it to partner shelters, food banks, soup kitchens and more. And she got a tax receipt to boot!

• It can be tempting to deliver the produce yourself, but check with the program first. Some food pantries, etc., have certain requirements about what they can accept or don’t have the resources to sort and store produce. If they can’t accept it, they’ll likely know of a group that can. Win-win!

Next Week: We fill up on farro.