Surprising grapefruit is great in recipes

It's brilliantly hued, sweet, sour, bitter, fragrant, lovely, invigorating and always surprising

In the winter, my husband is a grapefruit fiend. He spends the shoulder months between the end of seasonal fruit and the beginning of grapefruit season complaining about the lack of good fruit and hunting down the perfect honey crisp apple. Occasionally he succeeds and basks in the triumph of finding a good apple.

When grapefruit season kicks in, where they are from can make or break his mood. They have to be from Texas, though he will grudgingly eat them from elsewhere.

His ideal grapefruit is bursting with juice and has a perfect balance of sweet, sour and bitter.

I don't have the same kind of obsession with fruit as he does, though I will bring home specimens that I deem worthy. I'm glad he eats them because I love the scent when he peels them. It's uplifting in a way that no other scent is.

I'm remembering grapefruit spoons and curved grapefruit knives and wondering if anyone still uses them. When I was growing up, we had both and I used them because they were a novelty. And because of the grapefruit diet, which was basically a keto way of eating with a glass of grapefruit juice or half a grapefruit with every meal.

And because of home economics class we learned to section a grapefruit half, broil it under a blanket of brown sugar and serve it garnished with half a maraschino cherry.

Even though they are royalty, or treated like they are, they're not a common recipe ingredient. Oranges get more airplay and while the orange is a fine fruit, it lacks the snap and the brilliance that the grapefruit offers.

The Forrest Gump quote of “life is like a box of chocolates” always struck me as odd. Life is more like a pink grapefruit. It's brilliantly hued, sweet, sour, bitter, fragrant, lovely, invigorating and always surprising.