The Domestic Queen

Once your leafy vegetables are truly cleansed, fling excess water off, wring them dry and pat excess water off with some paper towels. After that, bundle them up in a roll of paper towel and tie with a rubber band (if possible) and seal them in an air tight zip lock bag. Alternatively, you could also store them in a sealed container but make sure they are wrapped in paper towel first to soak up excess moisture.

How do you normally clean your vegetables?

Before I forget, if you do buy vegetables from China (not all but many), make sure you clean them very, very well…..because a friend of mine told me that they sometimes spray paint their greens so they look err…..green!!! For example, if you bought some brocolli from China, soak it in water and if you’re unlucky, you’ll find that the water immediately turns green after a while. Gross!

We do not buy vegetables from China.

How we normally clean our green, leafy vegetables is by soaking them in water for 15 minutes, then rinsing them out. You will find that the bottom of the water has debris of soil and stones from the vegetables, sometimes even worms. Throw the dirty water away completely, then soak the vegetables again, roughing them up with your hands, rubbing the leaves around so all dirt gets removed from the veg. Throw away the water again and repeat for one last time. When you see no more debris in the water, your vegetables should be clean enough.

Squeeze them dry but not to the point where they break up. Then wait for my next post on how to store them in the fridge or in the freezer. Yes, green, leafy vegetables can be frozen! A Japanese friend of mine only has time to go to the market once a month, so she buys in bulk and freezes ALL her vegetables!

What do you normally do whenever you deep fry some fish or have a baking tray that’s loaded with oil? We all know that oil and water don’t mix so then what? Use lots of dish washing liquid?

I learnt a trick the other day and you may already know it but it helped me a lot.

First of all, never ever pour the used oil down into your kitchen sink (or even your toilet bowl) as it would clog it eventually over time. Pour the used oil into a container that you can afford to chuck out, like a used yogurt tub or an old tumbler (if it is too big, you can always store it closed in the fridge until it fill up and then throw it out into the dustbin). Then grab a  paper towel(s), fold it and wipe off the excess grease from your pan. Lastly, pour boiling water onto your pan to get the last bits of grease off your pan.

Then you can wash your pan normally with dishwashing liquid. Voila! Clean pans as good as new.

Ever since we bought the Karcher, things are smelling (add a few drops of essential oils into the hoover water) a lot better in our bedroom. With me suffering from major allergy attacks, I can safely say that the Karcher dust mite buster is an amazing invention. It is a completely mechanical contraption designed by German precision that sucks up dead skin cells and mites off our mattresses and pillows.

I can really feel the difference! My nose doesn’t feel so itchy anymore and I get less asthma attacks. I love mechanical products, not electronic products. because electronic products can have their off days whereas mechanical products can be fixed quite easily using straight common sense!

I onced asked an electrician how I could save on my electricity bill - should I watch less TV, should I always turn the lights out, is it the air-conditioning (mind you, we don’t use air-conditioning because we live beside a jungle and it’s naturally very cool), or is it the treadmill?

He told me it was my electric kettle. He said that everytime electricity was used to boil water, a LOT of energy is used and it’s really worth chucking out the electric kettle and boiling your water using gas instead. Also, people have a habit of clicking on the electric kettle switch everytime they need hot boiling water when really, you should just boil it once and store it in a flask. If you don’t like doing that, then you should only fill the kettle with the amount of water you need for that one time and click the switch so minimal energy is used. And still, gas is the best option for boiling water.

My mother tried this recently. She has a big electric water boiler which keeps water boiling hot all the time but now, she switches it on only when she needs hot water. This is saving her RM25 a month from previous bills. RM25 x 12 months is RM300 a year.

If you live in a home like ours where humidity is high, and even if you didn’t, you should always store your camera (especially if it’s an expensive camera) in a dust free, vacuum sealed environment; or over time, your camera lense would start growing mold and tiny particles of dust gets trapped in the little crevices of your camera. Cheap option? Get an Ikea storage box and store it in an air-conditioned room. Pricier option? Get a humidity controlled cabinet.

My daughter just asked me how to make brown whilst she was painting her parrot on a branch. I told her to mix some orange (yellow and red) with a bit of green and some blue. Worked like a charm. She got just the right shade of tree branch brown.

Professional artists only work with 3 primary colours. Everything is mix, mix, mix *wink*

Strawberries from Cameron Highlands generally last a maximum of 7 days from the day they are plucked. We came back with a whole load of strawberries and didn’t end up giving them all away before it was too late, so what did I do?

I made the family some strawberry milkshake and baked a strawberry cheesecake! This was on Day 7, the very last day before strawberry death.

Strawberry Milkshake - 2  to 3 dozen strawberries (we had lots!) cut into pieces, half a litre of milk, a big scoop of ice cream (preferably vanilla or strawberry, we used Ben & Jerry’s), 2 cups of ice and half a cup of sugar. BLEND!!!

Strawberry Cheesecake - 8 Digestive biscuits pounded with 100g of butter and pressed tight into a small cake tin (7 inch diameter), put aside. BLEND a 250g bar of Philadelphia cream cheese, a cup of light sour cream, a cup of castor sugar, 3 large eggs beaten together with some cut strawberries till smooth. Pour onto biscuit base and bake in moderate oven for 20-30 minutes. Cool and refrigerate. Decorate with freshly cut strawberries. If you want, you can also blend some strawberries with some sugar to make a strawberry sauce to drizzle over the cheesecake.

We managed to finish all our strawberries. We had 5 boxes left. That’s about 10 dozen strawberies! It’s amazing we didn’t turn into strawberries.

Is incredibly BOUNCY. It’s almost like having a bouncy castle in our bedroom. What am I saying? It IS Tee’s bouncy castle in the bedroom. Forget the RM400 bouncy castle her Nana got her from ELC (which we’ve secretly put away, shhhh…..).

It is the IKEA Sultan Hustad Spring mattress that is a mid-range priced mattress of about RM800. We weren’t sure what the future sleeping plans were for the four of us so since the Hubs was getting squeezed out of our King Sized bed, he bought himself a full single mattress. Now, I’m sleeping on it. To be honest, we play musical beds most days. I find the mattress too springy and too soft for my liking. Yet, it works some days and not on others. Weird? Well, I’ve always preferred harder mattresses…..With this Ikea mattress, you tend to sink in and it makes it very difficult to walk on without losing your balance. It really is like a bouncy castle!!!