Winter is the season for tangerines and other mandarin oranges. There’s something wonderfully comforting about enjoying a big bowl of ripe, juicy, sweet mandarins in the middle of dismal, dreary winter. Walking around the neighborhood, oranges stand out like light bulbs against their bushy green trees among most of the other trees, now skeletal from the cold. If you love the flavor of tangerines as much as I do, mandarins are available by the box load at most markets, and Odwalla makes an excellent fresh tangerine juice that you can only buy now, during winter. Either makes a refreshing, light sorbet. Homemade ice creams and sorbets tend to be icy, because they don’t have the stabilizers in them that commercial products have. So, they usually need to be eaten the day they are made, unless you add alcohol or corn syrup to them to help keep them smooth for a day or two more (they will eventually get icy). In this case, I couldn’t think of any alcohol to add that wouldn’t detract from the tangerine flavor, so I added a tablespoon of corn syrup (could add more), which helped to keep it from being too icy the next day. Still, it was better the first day, and more snow-like the second.

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