Jus d'orange

A month ago, I promised pictures and recipes for food volunteers make here.

Here at the Natitingou Workstation, we have a lemon tree, a banana tree, and an orange tree.

From the lemon tree volunteers can make: key "lime" pie, lemonade, lemon merangue pie, lemon bars, citrus french vanilla ice cream and marinades that require lemon juice. From the banana tree volunteers can make: banana bread, banana waffles/pancakes, banana beignes (ben-yays) and so on. And from the orange tree volunteers can make: orange juice, orange icing, and probably orange marmalade if they (I) knew how.

I'm sure for each fruit there's a ton more things that could be made.

The other day, I decided to make fresh squeezed orange juice which is, believe it or not, a true testament to my ingenuity. We have these trees here but they do not get used very often. They just smell good and prick you when you grab the branches (except the banana tree). Usually, we just stare at the trees and comment on how much fruit there is and how big it is. Baffling.

To make fresh squeezed orange juice, I simply remembered the Florida Orange Juice commercial. You know, "18 oranges squeezed into every box."

Lies, lies, lies.

I squeezed 18 huge, juicy oranges and got MAYBE 5 jarsfull (jars that were filled with jelly, that we use to drink from) of juice.

It took 2+ cups of water plus 1/2+ cups of sugar to make it taste like "orange juice."

Fresh squeezed orange juice is good but the oil from the peels gets pressed into the juice giving it a bite and, at least in Africa, it's unavoidable. However, I can claim that my orange juice is 100% organic AND nature friendly. Those two qualities are not mutually exclusive. The orange tree is fertilized with a compost pile, the sugar was from sugar cane, I didn't destroy other plants to plant orange trees and I'm not owned by Coca Cola :)

Recipe
18 oranges

2+ cups water

1/2+ cup sugar
Might I just say: season to taste.

Enjoy!