Yogurt Soufflé Cake By Chef Sherilyn

The Yogurt Soufflé Cake baked by Chef Sherilyn is amazingly delish! It's pretty healthy too and not cloy at all.  The ingredients are composed of low-fat Greek yoghurt, a little little flour, reduced sugar, lemon juice and zest and eggs. The texture and taste are almost 99% like lemon soufflé cheese cake (all of us think so) but it has no cheese. No butter.  And the ingredients are pretty economical too.  She baked this cake twice in a month to utilize the huge tub of Greek yoghurt in the fridge that's about to expire.  This is an amazingly delish cake that I dare to indulge in with almost zero guilt.  

Sorry there's no recipe. Our teenage chef followed a few recipes and tweaked them.  If you want to try baking this cake, just Google for one. There are plenty of awesome recipes out there.  The cake is steam-baked. 

Updates On The Covid-19 Situation At Our Area

My regular guava seller from our Taman's pasar malam has been delivering guavas to my condo every week since the first lockdown last year. Her guavas are the best and she always selects guavas with the kind of texture that I prefer for me. The girls and I prefer slightly soft guavas vs. hard and crunchy ones. 

Last Thursday when Peggy delivered the guava to me, she told me a terrible news.  Her stall neighbor at the pasar malam had died of Covid.  He was only in his early 40s.   I sometimes patronized his stall to buy bananas and seasonal local fruits.  He was infected by his brother - all his family members were hospitalized and he was the last to be admitted but sadly, he didn't make it.

 

Our residential area is almost like a war zone now with over a hundred Covid cases.   Several foreign workers residing at a nearby shophouse plaza have been infected with Covid with several deaths. But the hospitals do not have sufficient beds for them and those with mild symptoms were asked to go home and self quarantine.   Maria, our part-time helper stays at the shophouse plaza. She and all her friends residing there were tested by the plaza Management with Covid self-test kits yesterday.  Fortunately Maria is negative.  It's going to take at least another month or so before Maria can safely return to our home.  Going out to get essential items now feels like going into the battlefield.  My heart pounds each time someone walks towards me.  I am treating everyone as Covid positive unless proven negative. 

The Taman adjacent to ours has been declared an EMCO area on Sunday with barbed wires cordoning the entire  place. Today the supermarket at our Taman that I always frequent is closed temporarily as a few of their staff were tested positive!  With this supermarket closed, the other supermarket and wet market adjacent to our Taman under EMCO also closed, I think I'm going to have to resort to getting fresh veggies and meat from online sellers again.

When will the Covid war ever end?! We are all so tired battling this war for 1.5 years with no light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, it's getting from bad to worse.  

I can't wait to get my second dose of the AZ vaccine next Wednesday.  The hubs has gotten his second dose last Wednesday.  Dear God, please keep me and my loved ones protected from Covid 🙏

Tuesday, 20 July 2021 Lunch

Our teenage chef cooked Rabokki for lunch today.  The Tteok (rice cakes) was made from scratch using simple and cheap pantry ingredients like rice flour, glutinous rice flour and sesame oil.  Besides the egg  in the gochujang sauce, I don't really fancy Tteokbokki.  I'm not a fan of starchy foods. While the girls dug into their lip-smacking Rabokki and chewy tteok, I was content with my healthy low fat sugar-free Greek yoghurt with nuts and Serawa Durian (durian kaya) that hubby made at his central kitchen 😬

A sucker for everything challenging and difficult.  If the dish is not complicated, she wouldn't cook it.  I'm just the polar opposite!  Why want to make your life complicated? 😐 

This girl loves cooking anything that involves kneading dough!  Playdough used to be her favorite toy as a toddler.

I'm totally content with my low fat Greek yoghurt with durian kaya (Serawa Durian) that hubs made. This lockdown, he has mastered the art of cooking Malay food and delicacies 💪👏👏

Durians For Breakfast and Lunch Again!

These days I look forward to hubby coming home. Not that I miss him but I look forward to the durians that he brings home 😁.  He helps his best friend sell durians online and he gets free durians almost everyday.  

This was my breakfast yesterday morning - Musang King, Tekka, Phoenix and Red Prawn durians.  Some of the durian seeds that you see here were rejected ones, nonetheless they were still SO GOOD!!  They only sell 100% perfect durians to their customers who can pre-order everyday during the season season. Instead of discarding these still good but not 100% perfect durians, hubs brings them home for us humble folks to savour.

I can eat 10 seeds at one go but the health freak in me stops me from doing it.  I eat 3-4 seeds a day and drink matcha and sugar-free lemon juice everyday to prevent heatiness.  Exercising and sweating helps to cool down my body and I swear by it. Thus, I jog and brisk walk from 10 to 10:40 a.m. everyday to soak in the goodness of the sun and to sweat it out to get my dose of serotonin.

Yesterday hubs brought back Serawa Durian from his shop.  This morning I had low fat Greek yoghurt with Serawa Durian for brunch and it kept me full the whole day.  I then had an early dinner of Nasi Lemak and chicken rendang (from hubby's shop) at 4:30 p.m..  I have been eating my dinners at around 4:30 - 5:00 p.m. for the past two years as part of my Intermittent Fasting (IF) practice.

Never heard of this combination - durian kaya with sugar-free Greek yoghurt? Try it and I'll wager that you'll love it 😬

If you'd like to try Durian King 70 Musang King durians and Catermate's Serawa Durian, you can place your order via Whatsapp here - wa.me/60198981881

Saturday, 17 July 2021

I made a spur of the moment whim to cut my hair today as it's been extremely hot and humid for the past one week. It was done in my bedroom and  the hair stylist is none other than myself!  It only took me 5 minutes to get about 22cm of hair trimmed! Easy peasy! The last time I had my hair cut was exactly a year ago, during the first lockdown and Sherilyn was the hair stylist.  My neck now feels so airy without the long hair twirling around it like a scarf in billy boiling temperatures.  I'm so proud of myself 😆

This is the second time that I cut my hair myself.  I guess it's super easy as I have fine baby hair texture that's thin and straight.  I've cut the most difficult of hair before and it's Cass' hair as her hair is thick and frizzy.  This finicky rascal was super satisfied with my work 😁.  

Haru gave us a big scare today when she vomited twice and kept pooping. I was about to drag her to the vet but when I saw that she looked active and content after the purging and vomiting episode, I decided to wait for a few hours while monitoring her closely.  Thank God she's as right as rain again after fasting for half a day with just sips of water intermittently.  I can't pin point the culprit that's causing her to purge and vomit but I suspect that she overate some pork from our soup for the past two days.  She kept purring for food lately each time we're in the kitchen and we fed her four times a day (twice with wet food and twice with kibbles).  We now have to cut down her feeding from 4 times to 2-3 times daily. 

Always keeping us on our toes and giving me additional chores everyday. Nonetheless, we're grateful that Haru came into our lives.

Time To Resume Healthy Eating

I have a confession.  I haven't really lived up to my blog moniker of being a health freak mommy.  For the past 1.5 years that we've been in and out of lockdowns (MCO, RMCO, CMCO, FMCO, EMCO),  I have not been eating as healthily as I should have been.  Our country has the most types of lockdown in the world and yet the Covid numbers are rising scarily every day 🙄.  Today's tally is 13,215 😭.

Unhealthy snacks and foods gave me the comfort that I needed throughout the lockdown. Being cooped up in an apartment 24/7 for 1.5 years with 3 teenage girls and a mil is something that no educated and working woman in the 21st century looks forward to. Thankfully hubs is in the essential service and gets to work at his central kitchen.  So that's one less person to be copped up with 24/7!.    

Besides running outdoors, the other thing that I have been doing throughout the lockdown to get my dose of Serotonin is snack on junk food. My favorite snacks are muruku, satay fish, brownie chips (albeit this is considered 'healthy' as it's made from supposedly healthy ingredients), emping chips and tapioca chips.  My kind of go-to snacks are not as gravely sinful as the typically labelled bad junk food like potato chips, candies and ice-creams but they are still processed snacks with sodium and sugar. After 1.5 years, I realized that I've had enough of unhealthy snacks. I told myself that I have to start eating clean and healthy again for myself. I have a fibroid growing again and I have Familial Hypercholesterolaemia (genetically inherited high cholesterol) and if I continue snacking on junk food, I'm slowly digging a grave for myself.

I have been avoiding getting a cholesterol blood works done this year and I can only brave myself to go to the clinic after I'm done with several months of eating clean to clear all the junk from my system.  And yes, I have to clear all the negative and pent-up emotions in my system too as these are also partly to be blamed for the fibroid to grow again. 

So here I go shopping again for healthy foods -- raw organic sprouts / microgreens, organic bell peppers and organic salads. And not forgetting the sweet potatoes, walnuts, almonds and other nuts.  I also sip on fresh lemon juice and premium matcha throughout the day.

My healthy lunch of pesticide-free greens (baby spinach, baby kale, red and green chard) with avocado, a hard boiled egg, almonds, cashews and pecans drizzled with sesame dressing and a splash of apple cider vinegar.  

I love the range of pesticide-free salads from The Greenery.  Their veggies are grown in fully enclosed greenhouses without the use of fumigation and pesticides.

We've been having sourdough breads pretty frequently lately as hubby's aunt who stays 2 floors below ours is still perfecting her sourdough bread baking. Thus we're the fortunate beneficiaries of her range of sourdough breads, sourdough pancakes and sourdough herb biscuits.

The mil treated us to Aussie avocados. She shared a box of avocados with a relative purchased at wholesale price @ RM4.70 each 

One of my healthy brunches this week -- raw red bell pepper with mashed avo + hard boiled egg.

Using Hand Sanitizer To Kill Ants

After trying a dozen of methods to kill ants by using gentle ingredients but with little success and feeling really frustrated with the infestation of tiny brown ants in my kitchen and surrounding Cass' desk (this brat eats at her desk!), I tried another method just out of curiosity to see if it worked.  I wiped our kitchen counter and floors with hand sanitizer and VOILA, I saw dead ants everywhere! 

All I did was pumped some hand sanitizer with sodium hydroxide and wiped the sides of the kitchen counter, the dining area floor and under Cass' desk and that's it. The ants just stopped coming and I see dead ones here and there. 

What prompted me to use hand sanitizer was our leftover stash of hand sanitizer which we spent much effort and money to hoard during the first wave of Covid-19 early last year. At that time, face masks and hand sanitizers were flying off the shelves of all the pharmacies around the Klang Valley. Whenever we saw any being replenished, we went berserk and grabbed bottles of hand sanitizers and face masks though some unscrupulous sellers jacked up the price.  Now that face masks and hand sanitizers are a glut everywhere and they are even given as free gifts, we now have too many bottles of hand sanitizers and some are nearing their expiration dates.  Thus, I use the hand sanitizer to do general cleaning around the house and experimented it with ants. And it worked!

So glad I found another accidental discovery! 😂😂😂

I am guessing that sodium hydroxide (also called lye) is the key ingredient that kills ants. 

If you have hand sanitizer that contains alcohol, this can also be used to kill ants.  However, this is quite an expensive method to try with. You could use your near expiration date hand sanitizers or simply use cheap alcohol and wipe it on the paths that ants move about to kill ants safely.

Good luck in trying and do let me know if any of the methods that I mentioned works!

Fun Things To Do With Your Children

 Our children, whether boys or girls, are God’s blessing to us.  No matter how busy we may be in our daily lives, we as parents should spend some quality time with our children everyday in order to bond with them and to let them know how much they are loved.  There are plenty of fun things to do with your children and while you’re at it, don’t forget to snap lots of photos and record videos for keepsakes. You and your children will have a great time looking at those photos and videos again years down the road. You will all have a nostalgic time reminiscing those great times that you spent together as a family.

Here are some fun activities that you can do with your children to create happy memories that will last a life time.

1  Get a pet

A new pet at home will cement the relationship of the children and parents and between siblings when everyone works together to care for the pet. There will surely be lots of rolling laughter and joy with a new pet running around at home with its antics. I can vouch on that after Haru our pet kitten came into our lives.

 

2 Wear matching outfits

One of the things that our family does every year during Chinese New Year is wear matching family outfits and take lots of photos.  This year is however an exception due to the pandemic and restrictions. We can’t wait to wear matching outfits again next Chinese New Year.

 

3  Escape everything and go on a camping trip

A camping trip in the forest is a great way to foster family bonding, enhances problem solving skills, get the kids to exercise out in the sun, appreciate nature and do everything as a family.

 

4  Devour everything at the morning market or night market

Be daring and adventurous and try all the new foods at the market.  It will be a cheat day and a fun one too. Strictly no calorie-counting is allowed!

 

5  Order a huge ice cream sundae

Which kid doesn’t like ice cream sundae?  The mood-lifting powers of the banana split or 10 scoops of all your children’s favorite flavors on a gigantic waffle for them to dig into while you snap away those precious photos for social media bragging rights. I love how Facebook reminds me of photos and memories that I posted on the anniversary every year.

 

6  Splurge on cheap and funky clothes

My daughters love it whenever I bring them to the mall to shop for cheap clothes during sales. Sadly, due to the pandemic and lockdown, we have not gone mall shopping for clothes for more than a year.  We now shop for cheap clothes online during massive sales. These days cheap kids clothes and adult clothes are plentiful at online clothing stores. I find it so convenient to shop for clothes online.

 

My girls can make me berserk at times with their unreasonable reasonings and behavior. But I know that I will somehow survive the rollercoaster teenage years and very soon I will miss those tumultuous years more than ever when they are adults and have their own lives.

Easy Way To Prevent Coffee Powder From Hardening In The Bottle

I discovered by chance that by placing a wooden stick or wooden spoon inside my jar of coffee powder, this will prevent the coffee powder from hardening.  It was a pure fluke discovery!

I have always hated scraping hardened coffee off the glass bottle each time the coffee powder reaches the bottom of the jar.  Recently, I noticed that each time I put a recycled ice-cream stick inside the coffee powder bottle, the coffee powder remains fresh and loose until the last granule. After finishing a few bottles, I realized that it must be the wooden stick absorbing moisture from the coffee powder. And that's the reason why my coffee powder stays fresh and loose.  I've tried placing a stainless steel spoon in the bottle and the coffee powder hardened even faster.  It must be the compounds in coffee that reacted oddly with the metal spoon.

Hardly any hardened coffee powder at the bottom of the bottle.  The coffee granules stayed fresh and loose till the last bit.  

If you've always struggled with scraping and hitting your bottle to get the dang hardened coffee powder out, try the wooden spoon/stick method and see if it works!

Tumblemats For Home Exercises During The Lockdown

The Enhanced Movement Control Order (EMCO) in most parts of the Klang Valley will commence today for a period of 2 weeks to bring down the infectivity rate of Covid19. In an EMCO, no one is allowed to get out of their house, except for one representative from each household, to get food and essential stuff. Areas under an EMCO will be fenced up with barbed wires with surveillance by army personnel. Thankfully our area is excluded from the list but we can’t rest on our laurels as our residential area was and is still a red zone; we may be placed under an EMCO if cases keep surging 😷.

I know it's going to be a tough 2 weeks in home quarantine. Many of you who are used to jogging, cycling and brisk walking outside your house will not be able to do so, even if it's within your own neighborhood.  But fret not!  You can still have a satisfying workout on a yoga mat, tumble mat or tumble track mat at home.  Since the first lockdown in March last year until now, our girls have perfected their floor exercises.  With guidance from hundreds of You Tube tutorials, our girls are now adept with Glute Bridge Sit-Ups, Tabletop Oblique Crunches, High Lunges, Superman Lifts, Diamond Push-Ups and much more.

For those of you with kids who are gymnasts, though practice at the training centre has to take a breather for a while, practice can still be done on a gymnastics mat tumble track at the comforts of your own home.  The tumble track is great for pilates and for the whole family to have some hilarious moments rolling and tumbling on it together. It's great for family bonding during the home quarantine.

These tumble mats can be purchased online and offline. But be careful to only get good quality tumble mats for safety purposes.  One tumble track mat company that produces good quality air tumble mat products is Tumblemat,  one of the world's largest suppliers of inflatable air tumble tracks and has 9 years of experience in producing air tumble track products to customers all around the world.

Exercise does not ever need to come to a grinding halt though you're stuck at home and battling one of the worst 'wars' in history with an invisible enemy. There are various ways that you can still have fun with your workout routine while you stay healthy mentally and physically at home. Stay safe everyone!

Melagel, My Miracle Gel At Home

I 've tried almost all the cracked heel creams and lotions in the market and none really worked. In my last ditch effort before I resigned to the fact that I shall have to live with unsightly cracked heels with dirt trapped in the crevices (yucks!!) for the rest of my life, I applied Melagel on my heels and VOILA, within just 1 night, I saw and felt the difference on my battered heels. They're so smooth now!  I'm now 1000% convinced that Melagel is my miracle gel for almost all my skin disorders and injuries, including chapped lips. I've been a Melaleuca user for 7 years and now even more convinced that I should not ditch my membership just yet.  

Melagel can be purchased from Melaleuca.  Some of the active ingredients in Melagel are melaleuca oil, wheat germ oil, cocoa butter, corn oil, Vitamin E and Vitamin A.