Being more health-minded than party-minded, when given the choice of a fruit basket or a spot at the company's holiday party, I picked the fruit. Yum! I thought, given the downturn of the economy and the funk hanging over newspapers in general, my basket would be a paltry four apples and a pear. Therefore, three days before basket drop day, I decided to purchase a giant box of tangerines, figuring that between the box and the basket, I could get myself through to my Christmas Day flight to Holiday Land.
But, it turns out, my newspaper isn't doing so bad. In fact, using the ginormous fruit basket as a guide, we should be buying our way to a Pulitzer sometime early next year.
12 huge oranges, 13 big apples (14 if you count the one I lost in the parking lot), 8 grapefruit the size of my dog's head.
About 40 pounds in all, covered with a few strands of plastic grass that fill children's Easter baskets. No filler, no foam, no guard rails (hence the lost apple). In fact, it was bigger than the photo shown above, because that's a photo taken after I'd already given away a few pieces of fruit.
I easily eat 5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables per day. But it's nearly impossible for one person to eat this sort of load (plus those sweet little tangerines) without it rotting in the fridge in the final days.
So, what to do? Who wants to gamble away such (free!) goodness. I don't want to miss out on all the vitamin C and fiber in this lot, but I'm on a tight deadline.
Fruit game plan time!
My plan is to juice and freeze any oranges and grapefruit that I have left the night before my trip.
Any straggler apples shall be cooked down to applesauce — just peel, core and cook down in a pot with a little water. Mash them or blend them until you get the right consistency and maybe add a bit of sugar if you wish. Ta-da: yummy applesauce that's better for us than what prebottled stuff at the store.
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