Category: oddities

There are already more photos of Palermo than one can shake the proverbial stick at, but I just can’t be bothered to sift through them yet and decide which are interesting to anyone other than me.

So, I’ll give you one ridiculous shot and a bit of a story. The handful of you who still come here are doing so for the narrative anyway, right? The photos are gravy, I’m assuming.

What’s with the title of this blogpost, you ask? Well, it comes thanks to Elaine (@elaine4queen), with whom I’m conquering Palermo. There was talk of cake, but we’ve not actually found any of that yet. In the process of our hunt for cake, however, we did find these Orange Balls.

We had both heard of these, but the billing didn’t quite do them justice. Nevertheless, until technology catches up and allows me to upload the taste of something on a blog, a description will have to suffice.

It’s a ball of some sort of corn breading with a variety of different fillings depending on the whims of whoever’s cooking. In this case, we were offered either Ham and Cheese or Meat. When I inquired about what sort of meat specifically was involved in the latter, the woman behind the counter looked at me incredulously and said with an odd finality, ‘Meat.’

Some might have balked, but now I was genuinely curious. The decision was snatched away from us, when the woman announced that they were, alas, out of the Ham and Cheese. We were having the Meat, and have it we did.

They were delicious. There’s a reason why numerous people, upon hearing we were going to Palermo, insisted we try the Orange Balls. There’s nothing remotely citrus about them, incidentally. Orange is a colour here, rather than a taste. Yet they were filling and somehow decadent, and even before we were halfway done, it was clear that there would be no room left for cake.

You could possibly be one of those folk who believes there’s always room for cake. To such a person, I’ll only say, ‘Have an Orange Ball in Palermo and get back to me on that one.‘