I was delighted to broadcast live from my kitchen for Live Lagom* at the beginning of January. I had been asked by the IKEA project to share some of the tips and tricks I use every day to reduce food waste, and during the Facebook Live event I was quizzed by a couple of Lagomers about keeping and using up oranges.

I’m sure most of us at some point have decanted with anticipation a bag of brightly-coloured citrus into the fruit bowl only to wonder what on earth to do with them a couple of weeks later when they’ve wizened and wrinkled.

One of the best pieces of advice for keeping fruit fresher for longer is to keep it in the fridge.

Now, not all fruit belongs in there. Bananas, for example, are injured by the cold so should always be kept somewhere cool, but not in the fridge where they’ll go black. It’s the same for pineapples, which should just be left to get on with the business of ripening appetisingly on a worktop.

If you start keeping your apples and citrus fruits in the fridge (which should be set 0 – 5C – more on that another time) I’m betting you’ll be astonished at how long they last. We keep bags of small apples in the drawer at the bottom of the fridge to pop into G’s school bag for him to enjoy at break time and they stay crisp and fresh for ages.

This year, when we did our Christmas food shop we were unable to purchase the number of oranges we needed: one. (This is a well-known issue for single people, for whom buying the right amount can be difficult and means that food waste per person is higher in single-person households than in those with several occupants.) The solo orange was incorporated into home-made cranberry sauce as planned, but the remaining fruits went into the fridge.

I’m glad they did. Instead of decaying slowly in the fruit bowl and ending up in the food waste caddy before twelfth night, they were still bright and fresh yesterday morning – weeks later. We decided to put them to use by making orange juice.

OK, it’s not really a recipe, but rather than just squeezing the juice from them, I set out to try and use as much of the fruit and goodness as I could. And if I’m being honest, we’ve not been able to lay our hands on the juicer since we moved house over two years ago!

I started by quartering each orange and removing the peel and pith from each piece:

Then I used the knife to scrape any remaining flesh from the fruit until all that was left was skin:

A good whizz-up of the pulp in the blender on the smoothie setting …

… resulted in a zingy, fresh juice packed with bits and bursting with flavour from oranges that had kept at their best simply by popping them in the fridge.

*According to IKEA Lagom is a simple Swedish philosophy on everyday life that means just the right amount – what living a rewarding, but responsible, life is all about: not denying yourself or sacrificing what you love, while not taking from the planet more than you need.