”You should drink a lot of mimosas so you don’t get scurvy,” is something my doctor has never told me, but I don’t think he’s a very good doctor. I bet if I switched to a new doctor, she’d say, ”Woah! Your vitamin C levels are low,” and then I could have as many mimosas as I wanted. In the meantime, I’ve been researching the best ways to juice an orange. Let us begin.

Run over it with your car

I drive a banged-up Volvo from 1994. It has a busted tape deck, windows that won’t roll down, and a windshield wiper that sounds like an injured hyena. It would be worth $800 if it could pass a safety inspection. It can’t.

So you can imagine my excitement when the old girl made me an excellent beverage. All I did was put a peeled orange in a plastic bag with a zipper top, run over it ten times slowly, add champagne to the bag, and shovel it into my mouth with a spoon. On my third bag I didn’t even notice the slight aftertaste of rubber and exhaust. Whee!

8/10. But two of these points are pity points for my old jalopy.

Use an electric juicer

I’m sure Gwyneth Paltrow has a gazillion-dollar appliance that juices wheatgrass and pomegranates and makes a frowny face if she skips yoga class or accidentally buys non-organic fruit. And I’m fine with that. She’s the queen of the universe and the queen of the universe should have nice things.

I, on the other hand, have a juicer I got for $10 at a yard sale. It’s not much to look at and it’s deafeningly loud, but it’ll juice an orange. Plus, the instruction manual is a hoot. ”Place your hand on the self-reversing reamer,” it begins. ”The reamer will agitate rapidly. Move your hand back and forth...” Um, really? A self-reversing reamer? You can’t make this stuff up.

6/10 for the juicer; 10/10 for the X-rated instructions.

Give it to a child

One of my friends has a bunch of beautiful children who are always squishing things and chewing on non-edible objects like couches and TV remotes. It got me thinking: surely those little maniacs could find new ways to juice an orange. They’d be orange-wrecking machines! So I went over there, gave oranges to the wee ones, and sat down to enjoy a cocktail with their mother.

Ten minutes later, all the oranges were lost except one, which was floating in the toilet bowl like an over-sized dead goldfish. ”It’s okay,” I said. ”Let’s try again.” But they didn’t hear me. They were already in the other room playing video games and sucking on lego. Well played, children. Well played.

1/10. This is reason #552 to wait as long as possible before having kids.

Extract the juice with a syringe

I don’t have a drug problem, but it was hard to explain that to the pharmacist while I begged her for a syringe. ”I’m not going to sell you one,” she said warily, ”because juicing an orange isn’t a proper medical purpose for a needle.” What if I needed one to take my medicine, I asked. Couldn’t she give me just the teensiest needle so I could take my medicine?

This was the wrong thing to say, apparently, because she handed me a pamphlet for a rehab clinic and asked me to leave. So I did. I went home, poured myself a generous glass of champagne, and toasted society’s progress in the war on drugs.

?/10. In retrospect, I should have washed my hair and put on a nice dress before I went around asking for needles.

Freeze it, defrost it, squeeze it

My physicist boyfriend assures me that the juice of an orange is contained in thousands of vesicles. The juice will expand as the orange freezes and this will cause the vesicle walls to pop, which will make it easier to juice the orange. There was more but I stopped listening because I was soul-crushingly bored.

I put an orange in the freezer to see if he was right. To be honest, I forgot about it for a few days because household science doesn’t exactly unfold like a riveting daytime drama. But when I took it out and defrosted it, it was softer and easier to juice by hand. Three cheers for physics? I guess?

5/10 for the technique, 8/10 for adding the word ’vesicle’ to my vocabulary.

Just eat it

This may sound crazy, but I’m out of oranges and I’ve been drinking straight champagne. I’ve had some deep thoughts. Like: maybe an orange isn’t meant to be juiced, you know? Animals are supposed to eat oranges and spread the seeds so more orange trees will grow. So why am I juicing this thing? Who am I to mess with millions of years of evolution?

But then again, if Gwyneth Paltrow says we should juice stuff, we should definitely juice stuff.

5/10. In a toss-up between Gwyneth Paltrow and evolution, one should pick sides very carefully.

Katherine Monahan blogs about food at eggton.com.