Sweet and Tangy: Temple Oranges

To the orange connoisseur, there's no finer specimen than the temple orange. a older mandarin-sweet orange hybrid that's both sweet and tangy. It has a complexity of flavor that no other orange can match.

Alas, because it has seeds many folks avoid the temple orange. That's their ill-fortune and your good luck. And at three for a buck at Iovine Brother's Produce at the Reading Terminal Market these large oranges are a good buy.

Though the skin is tight to the flesh, Temples can be easily peeled and sectioned by hand, much like its tangerine ancestor.

As with any other citrus fruit, you want it to feel heavy in the hand for its size -- that means there's plenty of juice inside. The thin skin will be shiny but not without some spotting

Whether eaten out-of-hand, juiced, sectioned for salads or used in baking the temple orange is a stand-out winter fruit. But get them now: the season is short, less than two months from late-January until March.

Newton Pippins Redux, and other Winter Fruit Tales

It's been nearly three months since I purchased my Newtown Pippin apples from North Star Orchards at the Headhouse Square farmers's market, and I'm down to my last four apples.

These great storage apples have gotten better with the time spent in the crisper drawer. Their skins are still shiny and waxy with little sign of age, and the flesh is a deep sweet-tart flavor, just juicy enough. I'm amazed I paced my consumption to still have a handful left, but glad to have this taste of autumn in mid-winter. Man cannot live by oranges alone.

Speaking of which, Iovine Brothers' Produce at the Reading Terminal Market has a wide selection of Chilean fruit. The bagged seedless green grapes I picked up last week were worth it at $2 for a bag weighing about a pound and a half. This week I selected two blemish-free Bartlett pears, a nectarine and a black plum. They're all sitting in a paper bag ripening on the counter, we'll see how they taste in a couple of days.

I also picked up some Temple oranges, which have come down in price to 4/$1, down from 3/$1. Very juicy, easy to peel but a tad more difficult to section than the last batch I bought. Limes eased in price to 4/$1, and avocados, which usually see their price increase dramatically for Superbowl Sunday, were a reasonable 2/$1.49 -- anytime they're less than a buck apiece I consider a bargain.