Orange crush.

We tend to cook most of what we eat during the week, so our grocery runs are pretty large on average. When we tackle food shopping (as many roommates / couples do, I imagine), we follow the theory of comparative advantage to ensure a speedy and successful trip: Nick makes a beeline to meat and dairy, ferrying heavy items back to the cart (which stays with me); I pick produce because identifying good avocados or ripe peaches can be daunting to an untrained eye / nose...and we meet somewhere around the cheese samples.

Ever since I started a new job Nick and I no longer share a commute, which means he's doing many grocery runs solo on the way home. This means he's definitely getting better at produce selection, but some items are trickier than others. Take oranges, for example: unlike fruits which change color and scent when ripe or show obvious signs of damage or bruising, the difference between a good and bad orange can't always be spotted.

Perhaps I should pause and mention my intense love of fruit. My first word was peach. The first time I discovered raspberries (I was maybe six or seven) was at a work dinner of my dad's. There was a large moat of fruit surrounding a roast beef display, and I stood at the table popping berry after berry into my mouth until my mom pulled me away. On our honeymoon, I had 3-4 passion fruits every morning with breakfast.

Nick, on the other hand, has never been a big fruit person - he has some preferences and tolerates others, oranges falling into the latter category. Since it's winter, I've been trying to stick to seasonal fruit, which means we're eating a lot of oranges (he humors me). I recently opened an orange at breakfast, and to our dismay it was on the dry side. For anyone who's experienced dry, falling-apart oranges, you know they're not the best - especially compared to the satisfaction from peeling open the bright fruit and popping sweet, juicy segments in your mouth.

"So what should I be looking for?" he asked, discouraged (I turned the rest of the batch into juice), in particular due to his already so-so feelings about oranges.

"A good orange should feel heavy for its size," I explained.

What, you may ask (as Nick did)?

I don't know how else to describe it, but it's true - it helps to pick up two of similar size and see which is heavier, but that's the best test I've found for finding the juiciest citrus (works for other types as well). There's not an objective weight you should be targeting, per se, but it just feels surprisingly heavy for an item of that size. To an untrained produce shopper (or orange-skeptic), criteria like that might seem wildly esoteric or otherwise ridiculous ("I know it when I see it!"), but give it a try.

On our next (weekend) shopping trip, we were using our usual divide-and-conquer strategy when Nick found me in the orange section. Hefting oranges and comparing notes, we eventually collected a satisfactory batch.

Our lesson must have looked a little crazy from afar, passing oranges back and forth for as long as we did in the middle of the produce section, but as I watched my husband (who cares not so much for oranges) staring intently at two identical-looking pieces of fruit, I knew that I had picked a good one.

Happy Valentine's Day, to my main squeeze.