I love this time of year, when the clementine oranges are at their absolute best. There, to me, is no orange that tastes better than these bright little jewels. When I was a kid, it was all about the mandarin oranges, in their distinctive cardboard box, individually wrapped in their green tissue paper. They came at Christmas and we always had one in our stocking.
The first time I had a clementine orange was about ten or twelve years ago. We picked up a little wooden crate of them at Costco with no idea what they would taste like.
In a nutshell…mandarins were ruined for me with the first one I ate.
For a long time, like mandarins, the clementines were only available for a short period of time; flown or shipped in from Spain. Now you can get them almost year round, but they are still more flavourful at this time of year.
