Vitamin C

I think I'm Vitamin C deprived. I've been craving citrus fruit for the past few days. It all started when I went grocery shopping on Friday. For some reason, I'm on a health kick, and so I spent a while wandering around the produce section of not-my-usual-grocery-store. I was amazed that they had at least 4 varieties of oranges, 2-3 varieties of grapefruit, and a good smattering of tangerines, clementines, and tangelos. (And then lots of apples, and bananas, and grapes, but these were of no concern to me!) I walked out with some pink-fleshed oranges and a grapefruit (I'm notorious for buying lots of fruit and forgetting to eat it, so I was trying to play it conservative.)

On Saturday, I went to the Northern Illinois Synod's day-long Congregational Resourcing Event. Dr. Klein from LSTC was the keynote speaker (fantastic), and I also went to a workshop he led on suffering and the book of Job. I also went to a workshop on prayer and a workshop on recovering a theology of awe. Anyway, they fed us great box lunches that included very very sweet oranges. And then I might have eaten another orange later that night.

So when I sat down tonight to figure out what to bake for my intern committee meeting tomorrow night, is it any surprise that I skimmed over chocolate cookie recipes, glanced at cranberry biscotti and pecan bars, and felt completely unmoved by any recipe until I came across a recipe for a grapefruit yogurt cake? It involved the zest of a whole grapefruit and the juice of half of it (leaving the other half for me to eat!), and was a fantastically easy cake to mix up.

It's cooling on my counter right now (I might have snitched a small slice off the end...), and I have to say, it's remarkable. My apartment smells like citrus and sugar and cake batter, and on a night where I'm struggling to muster up a sense of home, these smells are incredibly soothing.