Around this time of year the internet seems to be full of recipes for things involving blood oranges. It is citrus season but the obsession with blood oranges seems to be a mainly US thing because I’ve never seen them here, we do clementines and seville oranges and pink grapefruits but my corner of West London seems devoid of blood oranges. I know that they exist, I’ve seen photos of blood orange margaritas that apparently exist only in East London bars. Could it be that I’m not hipster enough for blood oranges? Possibly.
Still I wanted to know what it was that made them so amazing. Was it just the colour? Did they taste different from orange oranges? So when I found some in Lidl and bought some. Turns out that they taste just like orange oranges and the colour while spectacular, is….erratic.
This actually didn’t matter that much because I like oranges so it was no work to eat them. However because this month I am working on things I can drink that taste nice but are not booze, I decided to make a syrup with them. If you google ‘blood orange syrup’ or ‘soda’ there are lots of options. I took the juice and zest of 4 blood oranges, a cup of sugar and a cup of water and them all in a pan. I brought it to the boil to dissolve the sugar and let it simmer for 15 minutes. After leaving it cool, I strained out the zest and there it is blood orange syrup.
Basically I made posh orange squash. It’s lovely and when diluted with fizzy water it tastes great, it’s sharper and less sweet than squash you buy in bottles (I refuse to call the resulting drink soda – I’m not American and it feels pretentious!) but it’s still basically posh orange squash and disappointingly the vivid colour of the syrup dilutes to plain orange. That aside I think it would be interesting if you added booze, I think you could use it in a cocktail instead of sugar syrup and see what happened (if you do that please let me know!)
COOKING AND EATING
There is no way to make that mixture look good. Ok there probably is but I lack the requisite skills or patience! Anyway, I wrapped the mixture into the tortillas.
Wrapped in foil and stored in the fridge. At work in the morning, I took them out of the foil, wrapped in kitchen roll and heated in the microwave.
On Saturday, I cooked this 
I was going to freeze the remaining two portions of orzo but because I spent most of Sunday afternoon doing food prep I just reheated a portion of the orzo and called it done.
On Wednesday I had pasta with onions and capers 
February is a difficult month and this week ended with Valentine’s Day which is not terribly fun if you’re single. Actually, whether I’ve been single or coupled up, I’ve always pretty much ignored Valentine’s Day, I know that some people try to say that it’s just about love and that should be celebrated but essentially it’s a day were couples celebrate being couples and people who get flowers are smug. I’m fine with that but it’s not a holiday for me because I’ll buy my own damn flowers (when I can afford them!) and I’m not in a couple nor would I be inclined to being smug about it because….well it’s not really something you should be smug about, just go enjoy being with the person you love but go lightly on the PDA’s. All that to say, I just ignored it, which wasn’t hard, just stay off social media and don’t go out in the evening, and it was a Sunday so I wasn’t going anywhere (not that this is unusual!).
I wanted to have Saturday as a productive day and Sunday as quieter more resting day. So after breakfast, I ‘leapt’ into action, did food shopping and various other assorted housework. I also went to Grace. It was a good day..
On Sunday, after I made sure that I was all ready for the week, I read and napped and ate onion soup….which was lovely.
Hall
Nic Dempsey 