How to prepare an orange

I have recently (and belatedly) learned/discovered how to prepare an orange so that the segments are free of their inner membrane, for salad purposes -- as seen in tinned mandarin oranges, for example.

You don't peel it. (In fact, the process is rather easier if you haven't been sold easy-peel oranges!) You start by cutting off the top and bottom of the fruit, peel and all, with a sharp short-bladed knife, just deep enough to take off the tips of the segments. Then you cut off the rest of the peel, making sure you cut deep enough to remove all the pith, which will again carve off a thin layer of the inner fruit (and the attached membrane) in the process.

At this point the only remaining membrane will be on the two 'sides' of each segment when you separate them, and it should be possible to peel this off and/or squeeze the segment out whole. Obviously it's easier with large, tough oranges than with clementines, but for salad purposes it's usually sufficient to get the slices out in pieces -- it just pays to do the whole job over the salad bowl so that the inevitable dripping juice isn't wasted!

Fic progress

Chapters 10 and 11 proofread and edited; I've nearly caught up to my typing again. I'd made a lot of changes earlier while typing up Ch.11, most of which I think were (a) intentional and (b) an improvement, and I've retained most of them, while trying to clarify the obscure fanfic back-references ("in Perros-Guirec", i.e. in the year that Christine first met Raoul, "that night in the snow", i.e. the night she had gone to pray at the church in the snow).( Read more... )

Hertha is still just about ticking over -- at the rate of about one sentence this week. I thought I'd finished Ch.5, then ended up writing several extra paragraphs onto the end of it, and am now going back to the start of Ch. 6 and the difficulties of deciding how much of Christine's story to recapitulate from Hertha's viewpoint. In principle, as little as possible; what we want is Hertha's opinion of what she hears, not a re-telling of the same old plot.

I remember being rather disparaging of "The Vicomte of the Opera" for doing nothing with the idea of Raoul's wife save to retell the existing scenes with one extra character standing around; now that I try it myself, I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm achieving little more than doing the same thing :-(