Fresh Orange Squares

Last winter, a neighbor kid came around selling citrus fruits to raise money for her high school band.  I’m a big believer in supporting the neighborhood kids who go to the trouble to go door-to-door, instead of just hanging out in front of the grocery store, or sending order forms to the office with mom and dad.  And citrus–I’m on board with that.  I’d far rather buy fruit than candy bars, or soap or pansies or wrapping paper or popcorn or raffle tickets.  So when this order form allowed me to choose a quantity, I went for the biggest.  I ordered, sight unseen, a bushel of tangelos.

It turns out–that’s a lot of tangelos.  Our front yard slopes steeply down to the street, and this poor kid could barely haul the box up to our front door.  There was no way we could just eat that many tangelos as snacks (which was my brilliant idea).  They keep pretty well, especially if you can find room for them in your refrigerator, but still–it would’ve taken us months to eat them all.  We definitely wouldn’t have gotten scurvy.

So I decided I needed to do something with them–find a way to preserve them, or incorporate them into dishes so we wouldn’t feel like we were just sitting around eating plain old oranges all the time.    I made a lot of things that satisfied my urge to try interesting new things in the kitchen:  orange curd, marmalade, candied orange peel (that was a particular hit, especially when I dipped the strips in dark chocolate).  I made muffins, and coffee cakes, and pilafs and sauces.  It’s a good thing we all like orange as a flavor.

I found this bar cookie on recipezaar.  I don’t necessarily love that website, but every now and again I come across something useful there.  This was a very quick and easy bar that has the added bonus of being (relatively) healthy–it has no butter or oil; the fat all comes from walnuts and the one egg.  It only uses one orange (a disadvantage if you have a whole bushel to get rid of), but I discovered that the carpool kids liked them, and I made them a whole bunch of times.

It’s chilly and gray here again today, and it’s my carpool day, so I decided to throw together a batch of these to treat the middle-schoolers.  The kitchen smells like oranges and toasty walnuts; it’s going to require great willpower on my part not to eat the whole batch before carpool time.

Fresh Orange Squares
Makes one 8″ square pan

1/2 cup walnuts, chopped and toasted
1 orange, peeled and cut up
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg, room temperature
1 cup flour (I weigh a cup of flour at 5 ounces)

Glaze:
2 T. orange peel, grated (but I didn’t bother measuring; I just zested the one orange)
1/3 cup powdered sugar
2 t. water

Preheat the oven to 350, and spray an 8″ inch pan with pan spray.

Before you get started, zest the orange, then peel off the pith and cut up the insides.  Also chop your walnuts and toast them.

In a medium bowl, beat the brown sugar and egg for 3 minutes, at a pretty vigorous speed (I started at a low speed to mix them together, then gradually increased the speed, mainly because 3 minutes is a long time to hold a hand mixer, and I was bored).

Stir in the flour, the oranges, and the nuts.

Spread in the greased pan, and bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until golden brown.

While it’s baking, mix together the glaze ingredients until smooth.

Spread the glaze over the warm bars, then allow to cool.

Cut into squares; serve with napkins, because they’re sticky.

Obviously, you can cut these anyway you want, but if you make 16 bars, each one has 121 calories, and 2.7 g. of fat, making them roughly twenty percent of calories from fat (but like I said above, that fat comes mostly from walnuts).