i left the super market by 10:15am. coming back home, i found a himalayan salt lamp somebody was throwing out. it even included a package of spare light bulbs. my parents have a few salt lamps at home, and some in the cafe basement, left behind by the previous yoga studio. supposedly they have holistic healing properties, but i think that's mostly mystical mumbo jumbo. maybe that's why the previous owner decided to part ways with the lamp.
i cooked a new batch of tea eggs at the cafe. wednesdays are always hectic because my sister is there preparing her catered meals, but my parents are also there as well, so i can just hang back and do my own thing.
when my father's new pixel 6 arrived in belmont, i left around 2:45pm to go pick it up. today was actually kind of cold and i regret not wearing my winter jacket. instead i wore my fleece jacket which was barely enough and i stayed warm because i was pedaling. i was only gone for 30 minutes. besides the phone, i also grabbed my water spinach and corkscrew pepper seeds. i even had time to readjust the sprinkler, drag out all the garden refuse bins, and refill the sunflower birdfeeder.
back at the cafe, i took the phone out of the box. even though it's refurbished, it looked like a brand new phone, no hint of prior use. the only signs it wasn't brand new is it didn't come in a retail box and it came with a samsung charging plug. my father got the 256GB version for $300 (not including taxes). it came with a working android system (13) but i factory reset it and started over from scratch, importing my father's data and settings from his old moto G7 phone. android's transfer function is pretty simple, either do it via cable or wirelessly via device-to-device wifi. playing with the pixel 6 felt like playing with a pixel 7, and both phones are very similar. the screen is slightly taller on the pixel 6, but it still feels like a medium-sized phone (when used without a case). keep in mind that the refurbished pixel 6 was the phone i originally wanted to get (and did get) during the black friday sales, before i discovered the $20 google trade-in deal for a brand pixel 7. i think i would've been happy with the pixel 6.
i showed my father some of the pixel camera features (wide angle, zoom, portrait mode, power key twice camera shortcut) and set up google pay. we had to call the bank in order to get the credit card activated for touchless payment. since we ported over his moto G7, there wasn't much of a learning curve. one or two manually installed apps weren't transferred (i'll need to reinstall them again) and i erased a cleaning software that seemed a little suspicion. besides, with 256GB, there's plenty of storage space. it did feel a little unsafe using the phone without a case or screen protector (they arrived over the weekend, but i forgot to bring them). i don't think i could ever use a naked phone, unless it was one i don't mind accidentally dropping and shattering the screen.
by the time i returned to the cafe, my sister was nearly done with her food prep, which is a rare occurence, since usually she's still cooking until almost 5pm. i didn't eat anything all day, besides a croissant and some leftover minced pork that i mixed with a few spoonful of white rice. it didn't seem like a busy day, but a slow yet steady stream of customers made it so we nearly matched last wednesday's business. i finally left by 6:15pm.
i crashed when i got home. i figured i'd have some leftover ham for dinner, but was too lazy to prepare anything. close to 9pm i finally went into the kitchen thinking about making something to eat, but ended up spending the next 2+ hours making the seville bitter orange marmalade. i found a 16 qt stock pot in my kitchen that had a thick base (so the marmalade wouldn't scorch).
after looking over nearly 2 dozen marmalade recipes yesterday1, the one that i decided to follow was from mrs. goose. from other recipes, the ratio of orange to water to sugar seems to be 1:2:2. that's a little confusing because the oranges and sugar are weight measurements while the water is volume. i had a little over 4 lbs. of seville oranges, but used 4 lbs. for my conversion to make the math easier. that means 8 lbs. (!) of sugar, which is basically two whole packages. the water is harder to figure out, but 4 lbs. of water is equivalent to 7.7 cups of water; double that amount and i got 15 cups of water.
i started by juicing the oranges with my electric juicer. it reamed out the halves, leaving just the skin, which is what i want. fortunately seville oranges, unlike navel oranges, seem to be easier when it comes to separately the flesh (the pith, the seeds) from the skin. a lot of online recipes did it by hand, and i can't imagine doing it like that, it'd take forever, and you wouldn't get a clean separation. i didn't throw away the pulp and seeds, i saved them and later wrapped them in cheesecloth square to be added to the marmalade mix to extract the pectin. juicing was messy, made more challenging because the juice was especially acidic and would hurt my hands; i ended up wearing a rubber glove on the juicing hand.
once that was completed, it came time to cut the orange rinds into very thin strips. that took the longest, about an hour, to cut 13 orange peels. i halved the orange halves, so i had quarter slices of peels. i then cut then on the diagonal, so the strips weren't too long or too short. they were actually pretty easy to slice, the rind was pretty juicy, i thought they'd be harder, like slicing into leather. i thought about using the mandolin or the food processor, but since the peels were relatively soft and thin, i don't think that'd work. there was so much fine cutting that a few times i cut into my fingertips, saved by my nails. it was good (but dangerous) knife practice though.
when i was finally done, i dumped everything into the 16 qt stock pot and added 15 cups of water. i then left all the rind strips to soak overnight. tomorrow i added the 2 bags of sugar, heat to dissolve, before boiling the mixture so it'll reduce down to a jelly. of course i can't start any of that until my canning funnel arrives.
finishing by 11:20pm, i decided to make simple ramen for dinner. it was my first real meal of the day. i didn't know why my wrists hurt but then i remembered all the cutting i did for the marmalade.
1 a lot of marmalade youtube videos are from england, which makes me think marmalade are a bigger thing there than it is here in the US. on the occasion when i do get a non-english video, i actually think the person is canadian and not american, from the way they pronounce certain words. just my random observation.