At Sunday lunch, after 3 hours in church, we had fruit champagne. Couronne comes in a tall glass bottle like the real sugar cokes and it tastes like orange soda with a cantaloupe kick. It was fizzy, cold and sweet, but I was disappointed. It was tasteless compared with the real fruit champagne we’ve been drinking at meals, a fresh squeezed mix of passion fruit, orange, and grapefruit juices. This juice is sweet and refreshing and has none of the heaviness you might think about in store-bought juices. Yesterday, when I was exploring while everyone else napped, I noticed several skeins of long citrus peels drying in the sun.
This morning I asked Carmel about the peels. We had a bit of a language breakdown over the differences between oranges and grapefruit. Finally, we established that they were grapefruit peels and once dried they would be used for cooking. In a fit of cooks’ solidarity I said that I’ve cooked with dried orange and lemon peels, but never grapefruit. Carmel looked at me as if I was off my rocker. At lunch she appeared with oranges, double checked that MB liked them and added them to the fruit basket.
Thank you for the oranges, Carmel. Thank you for the fruit champagne.
-Kellaura
