Fresh

Last weekend, I made dinner for Miguel's family -- chicken marsala, which requires lemon juice. The bottle of ReaLemon lemon juice had just run dry the previous night, but I did happen to have two lemons sitting in the fridge.

"Irisvette," I called to my 12 year old niece, "can you come and squeeze some lemons for me?" And after slicing the lemons into quarters, she used all the muscle in her compact body to squeeze out a good 1/3 of a cup of lemon juice.

Angie, it appears, stored this experience away for future use, because this morning on our way to the grocery store she exclaimed, bouncing in her car-seat restraints, "Mommy, can we squeeze juice out of oranges?"

"Sure we can," I replied, "but it's hard to squeeze orange juice using just your hands, so we'll see if we can find a juicer, too."

"What's a juicer?" she asks, excitedly.

"You'll see," I say. And so, our grocery list grew to include a bag of navel oranges and a juicer, adding $5 to our grocery bill. When we got home, Angie wanted to immediately squeeze some oranges.

"Be patient, baby," I said. "I have to put Maddie down for her nap, and then we need to put away the groceries and have lunch. Then we can squeeze juice for our drink."

After the chores and a delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwich, we were ready to squeeze. "OK," I said. "We're ready to squeeze."

"First we roll the oranges," Angie said, rolling an orange on the tabletop with the palm of her hand, "so we can take the peel off."

"Oh, no," I said, taking the orange from her and slicing it cleanly in two. "We need to cut the oranges this time."

"Why?"

"You'll see," I said, slicing a second orange. I took a cup from the shelf and propped the juicer on top, and placed the apparatus in front of Angie. Taking an orange in hand, I pressed it onto the juicer, then, with her hand in mine, I guided her through the squeezing of our first orange.

"There's juice coming out, Mommy," she exclaimed, peering underneath the orange at the juice sluicing down the juicer and into the cup. As we continued the process, we stopped several times to check our progress. After the first orange was squeezed, we strained the juice into another cup and had our first taste of fresh squeezed orange juice.

"Mmmmm, that's tasty,"Angie said. "Maybe we could take the rest of the juice and put it in a container in the frideator for Papi," she added.

"I don't think there's enough juice for that," I lamented. After squeezing two oranges, we had gotten perhaps 1/3 of a cup of juice. And this led me to think of the half-gallon of orange juice in my refrigerator and the price I paid for it and the orange-growers in Florida. And if Angie were a bit older, we'd have had a wonderful lesson out of this:

1. Squeeze 10 oranges for their juice and measure the total amount of juice in a measuring cup.
2. Write the measurement as cups of juice per orange, or oranges per cup of juice.
3. Calculate how many oranges it would take to produce one half-gallon of orange juice. Or, calculate how much juice you could get from a given number of oranges.
4. Determine the cost of your fresh-squeezed half-gallon of orange juice using a price-per-orange and compare it to the price you pay in the grocery for already squeezed orange juice.
5. Do some research on the orange growing business to figure out how many oranges grow on a tree and how much juice you could get from one tree (in one season), and how many trees you might need to get enough juice for .....
6. Contact some orange juice companies to find out if you can tour their plant ( if there's one near you) or if they have any videos of how their plant works.
7. Research the daily consumption rate of OJ in the US and do some calculations to determine how many trees the orange growers need in order to keep producing juice for us year round.
8. Make a presentation, complete with graphics and charts to demonstrate the process by which you arrived at your conclusions.

I'm sure there are other things you could look into, but these were the ideas that popped into my head as we were squeezing.

I think very quantitatively, so almost everything I do has some relationship to math, for me. But this experience equally encompasses horticulture, writing, research techniques and math.

In the end, for us, it was enough to experience the squeezing and taste the fresh juice. We'll do it again when Papi gets home so he can taste some, too!