Back to the OP's original question, the chosen device PIC16F690 is NOT well suited to programming in C.
It has paged memory and no stack pointer.
Don't write it off, however, the Tutorial you got with the PICKit2 and Low pin count Board are an excellent introduction to assembler and the basic peripherals contained in thePIC16F690 (My favorite of the 8 bit PIC's) are the same all the way up to the new PIC32MX family.
You may find a C Compiler that will work, but it will be in efficient, I suggest you use it to learn Assembler.
I may be old fashioned but I am not a masochist, PIC assembler is (relativity) easy, it requires direct register control and when you move to more powerful chips, from any other manufacturer, you will find that you will still have to use direct register access in either C or C++, so you are better off learning it at the lower level.
I certainly don't think I would want to do my first PIC32 project in Assembler, but I sure am glad I was used to doing assembler level access to timers and interrupts before tackling the PIC32 in C.
I think the smallest of the PIC's that can really handle C is the PIC16F877 but am open to correction.
Cheers
Chris
EDIT:Spelling