My darling clementines

For a girl who spent a good chunk of her life in Florida, I am surprisingly anti-citrus. (And don't get me started on orange juice -- unless it's fresh squeezed, I can barely tolerate it.) There are pretty much only two kinds of citrus fruit that I bother with -- honeybell (or minneola) tangelos, and clementines. I'm not entirely sure why these are it for me, but it might have something to do with sentiment: My grandfather used to ship the former to me as a Hanukkah present, and the latter were the kind that my mother preferred when filling up Christmas stockings.

Anyway, when I went to Morocco two years ago, the food was generally average, except for one thing: the little tiny oranges that they put out at the hotel breakfast buffets. These oranges were consistently exceptional -- so consistently that I would grab two or three of them and snack on them throughout the day.

So today, while doing a bit of grocery shopping in Whole Foods, I noticed this:



To you, it might look like an ordinary run of the mill box of clementines. But to me, it's a yummy little reminder of North Africa.