Q: What is scarier than a fast talking auntie who whizzes around your house making a mess neater in 50 seconds?
A: A fast talking, smooth sailing, mathematically inclined, six sigma methodology using ah por (granny).
Today I've just been promoted from "auntie" (which I've always been) to "ah por" which is a rank higher in the pigeon pecking order of housewifey'ness. Ranking from zero which is dumb blonde in 9" heels and french manicured long nails to ten which is Peranakan grandmother with a fifteen generation pure Peranakan bloodline. Ah por is about 8.
OK, I'm exaggerating a bit here obviously. But I must say that I'm quite pleased with my findings of household tips that I've gotten lately simply by being home a lot and tending house. (One thing I astound myself with - I love tending house. It's fascinating enough to be a full time job, if only I could wield a knife safely most of the time.)
Household Tip #1: Distinguishing freezer food in order of freshness (aka how to tell if your frozen chicken is dead, truly truly dead)
Being the only one in the house, I frequently need to buy food in larger quantities (because they don't sell them cheap in petite sizes) and then break them up into personally edible portions when I get back home. To this effect, I am armed with a handful of plastic freezer bags (courtesy of SKP in Singapore) and handy knot tying skills. I bag them up, put them in the freezer, and once the food all freezes over, the bag of mince I just bought looks exactly the same as the bag of mince I bought two weeks ago. The next time I reach into the fridge, I end up picking the newer bag of mince first. Sound familiar?
There are plenty of solutions out there trying to tackle this problem, most of them generally needing a pen or marker so that you can indicate which bag was bought when. I've tried doing this before when I was sharing a household with 5 other girls. The result was, a) the freezer got smudged with marker ink in various odd colours at the end of the day, b) the bags got smudged with ink, leaving the dates illegible, c) try reaching into a crammed freezer with icy fingers turning over bags looking for a handwritten date.
Enter my latest discovery, Ikea food saver clips in various colours. These handy bags of 20x small clips and 10x longer clips retail for something like SGD$3.90 in Ikea. Ikea recommends them for half eaten bags of crisps, as toothpaste holders (some brilliant person took one, clipped a toothpaste tube at the base and slide them along the tube as they go along to make full use of every inch of toothpaste in the tube), to clip half empty pasta bags, bags, bags and more bags. The multi colours in the bag is touted more as a decorative feature than anything.
But here's the thing. To my Six Sigma trained mind, colours mean only one thing. Colour coding. So if you have something like two bags of these clips at home, here's what you do.
Step 1: Use these clips to seal your freezer bags full of food, instead of knotting them.
Step 2: Select one colour of the day - say, Yellow, and for everything you pack that day, use only yellow clips (its not too hard to find enough of one colour, Ikea clips are pretty consistent in the bags - they've got red, cyan, purple and yellow)
Step 3: All the yellow bags therefore make up "one batch" of food that you've purchased that day. What I like to do is note down what date yellow stands for on the fridge door or something like that. The next time I buy food, it'll be Purple, followed by Cyan… or whichever the next cooler colour is.
That makes sure you always know which foods you should be taking out of the freezer to use first before they all die. And because the colour code's already on the fridge, if you're sharing a household with seven other people, it helps to make sure that everyone knows which colour means what, just by checking the fridge door. It also makes it very easy to yell at a significant-other-with-the-IQ-of-a-neanderthal-concentrating-on-football from across the room, "Take the bag that has the yellow clip on it!!" instead of "Take the bag that has 16 September written on it!" (findings have shown that neanderthals are not very good at reading but do respond to colours as they represent different teams on the field.
Household Tip #2: Freezing Chicken Stock is a stupid thing to do in an ice-cube tray.
My ice cub trays are all broken, so today I went out to get new ones, in the hope that I could use them to freeze chicken stock in easy to use ice cubes. Of course, this is an old wives household tip that has been documented in recipe books and are everywhere on the internet. If there's a household time saver that any housewife would tell you, freezing chicken stock in ice cubes for later use is definitely going to be one of them.
Not.
I tried doing this and I swear - whoever's ever said it saves time obviously has not tried it before. Freezing chicken stock into ice cubes is an incredibly tedious waste of time. First of all you can't freeze very much chicken stock on one ice cube tray, so you end up needing very many ice cube trays to get a single bowl of soup. Second, you are left with a whole mess of oily ice cube trays to wash, and if anyone has ever tried washing them, and trying to reach into every single tiny little square to make sure it's grease free… it will drive anyone bananas.
So this is the first and the last time I am ever doing this. I'm happy I tried it at least once to debunk the tip, but the hassle of getting my hands dirty like that again is just not worth it.
So are there alternatives to using an ice-cube tray?
One helpful suggestion was to use a freezer bag. But this left you fighting to peel a frozen freezer bag off a fast melting, oily block of chicken stock. So, off with that. The tricky thing about chicken stock is not only the loading of the chicken stock but the de-frosting of the frozen brew that is the rub.
These days I re-use mineral water bottles (very clean, very plastic, very handy) or coke bottles to store my chicken stock. They freeze well, and all you need to do is to defrost them like meat, take them out and let the liquid melt in the bottle before opening to pour into the pot. I get these bottles free from my office (after I drink the water) and they're relatively disposable after that (or you can then recycle them with the local community). You'll probably need a funnel or some very good liquid pouring skills but the bottle mouth isn't that tiny.
Alternatively, I try to get my hands on re-used honey or pasta sauce jars, but those I tend to reserve for sauces and thicker liquids. They also do tend to have too much residual flavour on the glass.
Household Tip #3: Never throw away an empty glass jar without thinking about the 10 different ways you could re-use them.
I feel a pang of guilt throwing away or recycling glass jars from honey, jams and pasta sauces without trying my utmost to re-use them in some way. The thing is, I paid good money for it (if you thought you were just buying the pasta sauce, think again. Packaging and marketing costs are built into the product you purchase, baby…) and I'm not going to let a perfectly good and useful container go to waste like that. You see, plastic is one thing I can give up, because they're usually low quality, wrap around your food, warp if you squeeze too hard type materials. Same goes for paper, which is prone to spills, ink smudges and marketing peeling off the walls. But glass? Glass is a sculpted, durable, heat resistant, hard-wearing thing. (Same goes for metal, but they rust).
And glass doesn't keep aroma or flavour in them. If you ever thought that you'll never wash away the stink of a used pasta sauce jar, think again. The residual smell actually comes from the rubber (which would probably be stained orange) of the cap, not actually the jar itself. Throw the cap away, and it becomes a hundred other things, ranging from pen stand to coffee mug.
Here are ten things I'd use glass jars for instead of throwing them away:
1. Utensil holder. Especially good for jars where you're forced to throw the lid away (see above). These hold forks, spoons, knives, chopsticks, toothbrushes, pens, paintbrushes…
2. Measuring jars. Notice how most of your merchandise tend to get sold in pre-set measures? 250ml, 500ml, 750ml… Well, the jar already holds that much, you might as well use it as a measure the next time you want 250ml, no more, no less.
3. Coffee mug. Some honey jars come with handles, I've been lucky enough to find a few that served me very well as a coffee mug when I ran out and broke the rest.
4. Sauce holder for left over or home made sauces. I keep old sauce bottles so that when I need it, I use it to hold sauces that I make at home. They keep the sauces better than any plastic container I have at home.
5. Pickling jars. My brother used to do this at home. He'd grill red, yellow and green peppers in the oven, slice them up, and put them in a jar with herbs like rosemary, whole peppercorn… or whatever you like, and pickle them in olive oil (don't use the expensive type, you're just wasting your money). After storing them in the fridge for about a week or longer, they make great dips with bread.
6. Storage containers for small piecey items. These range from couscous to detergent to hair clips.
7. Small jam jars are good for melting down beewax and making your own pots of lip balm. I know this sounds all quite frivolous, but if you're not into making your own lip balm, they're also very good for storing travel sized moisturizers and creams. Oh, and because they're air tight, they hardly ever leak, and are strong enough not to break in the luggage too.
8. Larger sauce jars are great as a pot to grow your own sprouts. I am seriously not kidding about this. You can grow your own organic bean sprouts and alfalfa sprouts in your kitchen, and they taste much better (and cost less) than anything you can get from a supermarket. All you need to do is pop a small handful of them in a jar, top with water just enough to cover the seeds, cover with a muslin cloth tightened with a rubber band, tip them upside down to drain the water out every week and in two weeks or so they are ready to eat.
9. Tumbler for tea. I got this from walking down the streets of China (no city in particular, seems nearly every city in China does this) where men take their tea with them and sip from an old jar which has glass walls thick enough to keep the tea warm. When you've got no thermos flasks handy, this is equally good!
10. Salad dressing mixer. This is one of the best uses of sauce jars I've seen because it is so neat. In the jar, mix your salad dressing with all the messy oils and sauces. Close with the lid and shake to mix. Open the jar and pour to serve. This also stores quantities of home made salad dressing that I didn't get to finish. I simply pop the lid back on and throw it into the fridge to be used another day.
Household Tip #4: Choices, choices.
This is really based off a Six Sigma methodology, I kid you not. I'm amazed every day by the clever but kindergarten ideas that management consultants come up with.
How to make a good choice and not regret your decision tomorrow? Note: this does not apply to choices of significant others/husbands/boyfriends/wives/girlfriends/partners/pets/friends (or you would be a very sad person if you use this methodology). To some extent, it unfortunately does not apply frequently to clothes/bags/shoes/accessories either.
Step 1: On a piece of paper, list down all the qualities you look out for in the choice. Be free thinking when it comes to listing down all the things that would make you happy, or everything your dream choice should have.
Step 2: Weigh them on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being you wrote it on a whim because it's cute and 10 being that you cannot live without it.
Step 3: For each of the choices that you are deciding between, rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 for every quality that they possess on the list you wrote in Step 1, with 1 being it barely fits the bill to 10 being it is that quality personified.
Step 4: Multiply weight of the quality with the ranking of how much of each quality each of your choices have. Sum them all up to get a score. Pick the one with the highest score.
If you've ever used this to make your decisions on supermarket shopping or in buying a house, or choosing a pet, let me know. I know I started shuffling my priorities around when I saw a house that I just wanted to get.
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