Welcome back to another quarantine update everyone. Man oh man, I gotta say guys, okay I just need to get this out. Do you ever have those mornings where you wake up and just keep tossing and turning knowing you should be productive and get up cause it’s almost noon, but your pillow feels so nice against your face. Well I’m sorry if you haven’t experienced that. Anyways, I woke up, just another morning in quarantine.. ooo that rhymed. Turned over, and looked up at the ceiling thinking to myself what is the world right now, how long will life be on hold, when will we get answers? I just had a moment of wow this is starting to feel like a movie, it truly is.

As I mentioned in my last post, we are living in a time that one day, centuries from now will be taught in a history class. We are living in a time that is going down in the books my friends. We are living on the verge of not knowing when things will go back to normal, how long or how short that period of time may be. Families are going on beach walks, although they all have masks covering their mouths. Ladies and gentlemen we are also living in a time where seeing people wear make are second nature to us now, first Santa Barbara dealt with wearing masks throughout the period of the California Thomas Fire due to the lack of clean air quality for us to inhale. Leading into the second wave coming a few years later, but not only out of our town and state, but our whole country, worldwide.

We have now lasted over a full month and a few days of quarentine folks. Have you guys been taking up any hobbies recently? With all of this spare time on our hands we might as well get a jump start to showing off to everyone our new talents once we leave our houses, right? Me and my mom reached maximum boredom, and decided to try something that neither of us had ever attempted. Make marmalade/jam from scratch! We say why not it is a few hours out of our day put to good use, and we had 4 full bloomed kumquat trees in the backyard!!!

Soooooo without further ado…….

• First we harvested all the kumquats
• Then we put them into two large colanders and soaked them in water
• We found a recipe that was not too difficult but still would get the job done
• We began to follow the recipe first starting off with dicing the kumquats into fourths and dee-seeding each and everyone one of them
• Then we started to boil the fruit in sizzling hot water along with measurements of sugar, fresh zest off of a lemon, and lastly topping it off with spices for extra flavor
• Then we had to let it sit for 2-3 hours for the mixture to start to change texture
• As we returned we started to see the shift from fruit to the beginning of seeing marmalade form
• You are suppose to stir for 45-50 minutes to get the marmalade to its final form and then pour your final product into jars!

Someone help me understand why I have more homework than I did even during attending actual school! I get that teachers are trying to keep us busy, but hey, hello, we still have lives here!!

Stay posted for next weeks update!