I'm going to leave the froufrou for another day. No filangey reduction sauces, no heirloom, artisanal brickety brack, no premium, ultrapremium, superpremium melange of gilded, crystalline, diamond-encrusted glimglam.
Just oranges.
Yeah, I mean, if you have to impress a date or prove your manhood, you could caramelize the citrus or churn them into sorbet. You could sugar the zest or candy the peel, enrobing thick slices in deep, dark chocolate. You could do all these things, and then you would officially be a better person than I.
But how about we just declare you better right now, cut through the crap, and save ourselves a whole mess of time? How about we do that?
Then we can concentrate on eating the oranges naked, just totally and unabashedly nude. Stripped of their thick shells, devoid of their bitter pith, and sliced into fat circles. You can go crazy with the season's freshest, most colorful offerings -- the pink-fleshed cara caras, the purplish-red blood oranges, the sweet, unpretentious navels, but please, dear lord, don't make a federal case out of them.
Simply slice them and lay them next one another (overlapping just a touch?) on a large, round platter.
Please don't top them with honey or liqueur or make them into something they're not. Leave the poor things alone. Just this once.
For, really, they're perfect, absolutely perfect, just as they are, and how many things can we honestly say that about?
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Recipe for Sliced Citrus Salad
Go to your farmers' market or your favorite produce-friendly market and gather as many varieties of oranges as you can muster. Out here in Northern California I especially love the trio of cara cara oranges, blood oranges, and navels this time of year because the colors just really play nicely together. You could certainly add tangerines, tangelos, clementines, Mandarins or even big grapefruits and tiny kumquats to the mix if you're feeling especially radical.
To cut citrus in a way that preserves their nice round shape and cleans them of the bitter white pith, see this video. You can release the segments from the membranes as shown in the video, or you can simply slice them into rounds as I've done in the photo above.
That's it. You're done. Go do something else.
