Freshly Strained

Oranges are gross.

I'm not willing to debate this point. I'm just stating it as a fact. When you peel one, there's all that white stuff inside, and there are chewy parts and squishy parts, and membranes, and the whole thing is just vile. The idea of biting into an orange is roughly equal, in my head, to a zombie biting into a chewy squishy brain. If I were stranded on a desert island with only an orange tree, there's a good chance that I might die.

Orange juice, on the other hand, is delicious. Like an ugly duckling becoming a beautiful swan, somehow the lowly orange transforms into golden liquid sunshine, and all is right with the world.

Unless you accidentally buy the kind with pulp in it, like I did yesterday:



I'm not sure how this happened, but I have a few ideas:

1) Interference by an evil twin from a parallel earth. Homestyle, pulp-filled juice is exactly the opposite of the kind I meant to buy, so this is clearly part of a plot by Bizarro Joel and can only lead to ruin. I should ask Kroger to show me the security camera footage, so that we can see if the me who put this juice in my cart had a sinister black goatee.

2) Bad signage at Kroger. They can't even pluralize the word "toy":



How can we be sure that they labelled the orange juice shelves correctly to begin with? It's entirely possible that this is all Kroger's fault.

3) I wasn't paying attention. This seems the least likely scenario to me, mainly because it's the one where I assume blame. It's possible that while I was making sure I was getting the "not from concentrate" juice I forgot to also make sure I got the pulp free kind, but the idea that I make mistakes and that they are my own fault is as repulsive as the idea of biting into an orange.

Let's just blame this on Bizarro, instead.

It wasn't until I got the juice home and started to pour a glass that I realized it was the bad kind, and then I was stuck. You can't take opened juice back to the store, but juice is too expensive to just throw away because it has pulp in it. I thought about flinging the glass against the wall while shrieking, like JLo does when an assistant brings her a warm Diet Coke, but that doesn't really solve the problem. My next thought was that I could strain it, and filter out all the pulp, but would that actually work?

Let's find out!



I had all the hardware, so I poured in some juice and immediately ran into a problem:



There's so much pulp that it made the juice pool up and not pour down into the jug. I grabbed a wooden spoon, and was careful to stir, not press, because pressing might push some pulp through the strainer:



Eventually, all the juice went through, and I was just left with a lot of pulp:



I cannot possibly shudder enough.

After rinsing out the strainer a few times, I eventually filtered the entire half gallon of juice, and then drank a whole bunch.

Better luck next time, Bizarro!