Monday, February 28, 2011

Kitchen and Other Tips

You know how every person has their own tips and tricks how to make life better or how to avoid some great problem or simply how to do things faster. In the last couple of years I've found out so many things that I decided to share them. Some of them make me wonder how it was possible to live so old without hearing about them.

First of all, vinegar is so cool. You and everyone else knows that vinegar dissolves lime scale, but did you know that vinegar also takes care of burnt food? I had a constant problem with burnt milk. I had to deal with it nearly every morning and sometimes it's so bad that the pot is covered with a thick black crust. There's no scratching through that. Finally I Google'd it and found out that vinegar helps. I cover the crust with vinegar, put the lid on to avoid the smell in the kitchen and I leave it for a few hours. After a while the black stone-hard crust has become spongy and soft and comes right off when I wash it. Sometimes I have to repeat the process but at least I don't have to spend an hour scrubbing.

Second, baking soda should be renamed "magic powder". Did you know that soda absorbs smell? Small cup of baking soda removes refrigerator smell in half an hour. When it doesn't help, throw out that 2-week old lasagna hidden in the back of the refrigerator. I've also tried putting half a lemon in the refrigerator... Don't try this at home. The refrigerator was just as smelly except for the pungent smell of lemon trying to hide everything else. It smelled like a bad taxi with too many scented trees. Eventually defrosting rescued us from the smell.

The next time you're cleaning your stove, try using baking soda as a scrubbing powder. I really dislike the smell of household chemicals so I tend to wash surfaces with only water. Baking soda doesn't smell at all and it just removes ancient dark areas from the stove like magic. It's really nice plus it's really cheap and it's even edible in small doses so it's perfect for use in the kitchen.

Weighing salt can make life easier and cooking less stressful. I hate guessing when I can just calculate and measure. When I boil water for pasta, there's no reason to either add a random amount of salt, sometimes too much sometimes too little, and ruin a meal. There's also no reason to add a little, then stir and wait, then taste, add a little more salt, stir and wait... It's much more simple to pour two liters of water in a pot, take a bowl and a regular kitchen scale and weigh 12 grams of salt (you might prefer 14 grams). Pour salt in water and forget about it. Weighing salt is even more convenient when you're adding it to something you can't taste - like a large chunk of raw meat. Eighteen to twenty grams per kilo is appropriate for most meat. If you're adding cheese or salted bacon, or if half of the meat is just bone, adjust the amount of salt accordingly.

It's very likely that there's cyanide in your table salt. It's used as an anticaking agent so the salt doesn't get lumpy with air humidity. Sure it's in the form of sodium ferrocyanide or potassium ferrocyanide which has been shown not to be hazardous to rats until the ingested long-term amount was 0.5% of dietary intake. In salt it can be up to 20 mg/kg, so if a person eats 1 kg of food per day, they can handle 5g of potassium ferrocyanide, which can be found in uhmm 250 kg of salt?! That can't be right. Okay, maybe E535 and E536 ferrocyanide salts aren't that bad. You'll die of sodium poisoning long before you even start feeling the minor long-term side effects of ferrocyanide salts.

But still, always read the food labels at least once to see what horrible additives they have put in your food. Avoid the following food colorings: E102, E104, E122, E123, E124, E128, E129, E131, E151, E154, E155 and E180. You might wonder, if they're bad, why aren't they disallowed. Well, almost all of these are forbidden in some country, mostly in USA. If it's too dangerous for people in the USA, known for their great health , are you sure you want to be eating it? Did I mention it causes hyper-activity in children? Siiri won't be tasting much of those. When I discover that a product I've bought is laced with those azo compounds, I throw it in the trash and I boycott the company in the future for trying to profit at the expense of my health. Also avoid E621 whenever possible. A study in China showed that people who use a lot of sodium glutamate (E621, MSG) are 3 times more likely to be overweight compared to people who use very small amounts of sodium glutamate. Have fun trying to avoid it since it's even in most spice mixes sold in the store, not to mention all meat products and much else.

Corn starch is NOT the same thing as corn flour. I kept using corn flour in stead of corn starch for way too long and I wondered why the texture is not very nice. Eventually Erkki got real corn starch from the store and it's quite a different story.

Avoid buying margarine. It tastes awful. Besides, don't choose a product that vaguely reminds you of real food (butter), it sends the wrong signal to food companies.

Don't blindly prefer Estonian food. Estonian companies have sold their souls and mix all sorts of foul additives in your food for easy money. They'll literally add 5 dangerous additives to save 5% of production costs. Some companies are excellent but those you have to find yourself.

Darn... It seems many of the "most important" stuff that I've found in the recent years has to do with food additives. I know most people don't even read the tiny labels and don't care what is in the food as long as it doesn't kill immediately. I guess I'm just obsessed with food but that won't surprise anyone.

One last tip - get a dishwasher if it's at all possible and if you don't own one already. It really is a life changing gadget.

I bet I'll remember all the other tips when I'm nearly asleep but I don't remember any others now so it'll have to be enough.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Bad Vote

Brrrrr... I just got out of a cold shower. It wasn't voluntary - the damn boiler just can't handle Estonian winter and keeps running out of hot water. But now I'm ready to talk about politics, especially with the government election right around the corner. Electronic voting will begin tomorrow at 9:00 AM so I might as well make up my mind about whom to vote for.

Lets be honest; the choices suck. I keep hearing that there's no one to vote for and I agree with that opinion. Still I feel I need to give my vote to someone to be justified to bitch about government's bad judgement calls in the following 4 years. For a while I've been a supporter of Reform Party which is a centre-right, free market liberal party in Estonia (as Wikipedia phrases it). I'm all for liberalism and I love the idea of free market. They lowered taxes and made Estonia very lucrative for foreign investors. I think it's thanks to them that Estonia is currently in a much better situation compared to Latvia and Lithuania. Our economy looks nice, there have been wonderful advances towards electronically advanced country where we no longer have to fill in paper forms to be piled in some dusty basement, but in stead, everything is made available electronically and information travels faster and much more reliably. I think it's just so cool that Internet access is a basic human right in Estonia.

I kept voting for Reform Party because they are mainly concerned with advancing economy and money is the root of everything. They feel strongly about reducing costs in stead of taking loans. They even pulled Estonia through the global economic crisis without huge debts. I do love them in many ways, but - and this is an important BUT - I don't think I'm politically on the right side anymore!

Having a kid has changed my world views more than I ever imagined, although the change has been so subtle that I didn't realize it for a long time. A couple of years ago I was nearly a right-extremist if such a thing exists. I felt strongly about every man for himself. Some make it some don't. Some people didn't deserve to make it. I kept seeing people who failed at life and I saw many places where they had taken the wrong turn. No one pushed them toward it - they chose to not pay attention in school or to skip classes or take jobs with no perspective when they could have settled for temporary worse pay and a better future. I saw that homeless people were always drunk on cologne or cheap booze - no one poured it down their throats - and I saw how people ended up in dept because of loans they never could afford in the first place - loans they should have declined. All those people had made their choices and failed. I felt very strongly: Why should I care if they have no motivation to strive for a better live? I myself managed on student's loan (little over $1000 back then) for nearly an entire year (I didn't have to pay rent) and I felt proud that I can handle anything life throws at me. I didn't have any pity for people getting minimum wage (more than I had) and kept whining about government not giving them free money.

The change was subtle. When Siiri was very small I sometimes thought about mothers in third world countries and the high mortality rate of babies there. I thought about the poor little babies suffering from illnesses that are routinely cured here. Someone really should try to help them. How about all those 3-year olds crying because they are just so hungry and their parents don't have any food. It's very painful to even imagine it. Okay, that's where my level of empathy stayed for a while. I realized that other people's minds have been tormented by world hunger as long as people have known about it and this hasn't solved the problem. It doesn't help if I also think about it because it's not a problem that I could ever solve.

A while later I realized there are people in Estonia who are suffering from hunger as well. Although all children are entitled to free health care (Yay!), there is no law about making sure their parents can afford food. Lately many people have lost their jobs and food prices have gone up. Now all over the Internet, forums and news comments are describing the everyday lives of common Estonians. They barely have enough money to buy food but the rent is overdue and bills are piling up. They don't see Estonia being a wealthy country by any standards. Of course they've never lived in Indian slums. People are miserable and there's an increasing gap between the wealthy and the poor. Politicians have been focusing on economy so long that they have completely forgot that there are people here, too.

In 1991 Estonia started from the soviet union mindset, where people believed that the government has to provide people with job, apartment and everything they might need. From that time on, Estonia has been on a path towards free market and individual responsibility for one's own fate. Much like the American Dream - you either make it or you don't. Taxes are dropping and the prices of necessary things are going up. Already dental care is so expensive that cavity-free teeth are a luxury that most people simply can't afford. Waiting lists to see specialist doctors are extreme - with some problems you either wait for a year for the doctor to see you or you pay for a private visit. Essentially, even health care has been made into a luxury most people can't afford. This approach isn't working in the USA and I don't want Estonian health care to become anything like that. By the way, I'm very happy for USA for the discussion of the so-called ObamaCare health care reform.

So basically I think it's up to the country to make sure that free good quality health care should be provided to all working citizens or children. Poor people often end up doing the nastiest jobs that simply need to be done and the entire society should be responsible for patching up their various job-related illnesses. And when the poor lose their jobs and they have children then we can't tolerate letting the children starve. That's why we have a society, to make the most of our common potential. There is no greater potential than our next generation. I've heard that society is judged by how the weakest members are treated and I do agree that there is a line that should never be crossed - in a proper civilized country, all people should have the basic necessities. The luxuries are what we all should strive for.

I'm not so hard-core leftist that I would collect all money from all people and divide it equally. However, I do think that there should be no homeless people and no one should be left to starve or cool to death. I don't think poor people should have nice lives, Utopia doesn't exist. Poor people deserve to have crappier lives for the wrong choices they've made in life, but there is still an invisible line. If we let our societies weakest to live below certain standards then our own humanity and compassion suffers and we are worse people simply for letting people starve and not doing anything about it. Perhaps the solution would be to build more soup kitchens or better options for poor people to get free food for food stamps - perhaps only basic food items (flour, milk, bread, etc) so they still have motivation to improve their lives. For homeless people I'd even provide basic beds in some over-crowded old building, with toilets and showers. It doesn't have to look nice, I'd even say it shouldn't look very nice, it just has to serve a basic function. Or I don't know. It just feels wrong that there are homeless people in the -20 C weather that we've been having for a while now. It feels wrong that some people don't wash themselves for months because they have nowhere to wash themselves. It seems barbaric.

Another issue I never used to think about is kindergarten availability. By law, all children are entitled to get accepted in kindergarten before they go to school. Unfortunately, the waiting lists are so long that some kids don't get accepted until they're 5 or 6 years old! Officials say, "well, that is before school." But what is the mother supposed to do? Not everyone can afford personal babysitters and some women have no choice but to postpone going to work. No point in spending time away from your child when all your wages go to the nanny. The mother might as well babysit her own kid. Or should the father stay at home? For equal rights, definitely, but that's usually not the way it goes. The mother sits at home, doesn't contribute as a working citizen, doesn't get any income, can't afford to spend money. Maybe she'll even apply for subsistence allowance to stay alive and she'll become a burden to the society, while she would be happy to go to work, if only she could put her kid in a kindergarten. It's such a stupid problem. It's not cheap to fix but it's well worth whatever costs. The current situation encourages poverty in families with small children, it encourages some people to be forced out of job market for so long that they won't be able to get back and it encourages inequality between sexes.

This kindergarten problem has been a heavy burden ever since I realized that by the time Siiri finally gets into kindergarten, I'll be at home with a little baby. So if I put Siiri in a kindergarten, I take away some poor woman's chance to finally go back to work. It will be so selfish of me not to give Siiri's place to another family whose dinners might depend on it. Yet I feel it's not something I should feel responsible for. I have also waited for years to finally introduce Siiri to children her age. Kindergarten will be so important for her social development. It simply feels wrong to tell Siiri, at the age of four, that she has no friends because some other lady might be more desperate to put her child in kindergarten. No, I can't punish Siiri for the government's mistakes. I shall punish the government - I will not vote for Reform Party.

During their time in charge they have done very little for the people. Their most important accomplishment in this area is mother's wages. After childbirth, a woman gets paid her normal wages for 18 months. This enables working women to have children and it encourages birth, especially among people with high income, as the maximum monthly wage is over $2500. This means that only stupid people with no monetary thinking have children before they're well-established in their careers and near age 40. I'm one of the poor suckers who got the minimum mother's wage last time and I'll get the minimum this time as well. No one wants healthy young people to have healthy babies. Obviously they want middle-aged women having fertility treatment to be able to have even one baby. Mother's wages with such a high maximum has a positive effect on birth rates for a while but in the end it encourages wrong kind of family planning.

So all-in-all I will give my vote to... dun-dun-dunn... Social democratic Party. I can just hear how some people just hit their foreheads against their desk, so I'll explain. Yeah, they're socialist and they want to increase taxes to increase benefits to all. But they are promising to provide kindergarten places to everyone, plus they support free school lunch to all (now it's only for some age groups I think), they are concerned with life standards in the countryside, which has been too badly ignored. They want to increase child support three-fold to €60. I think all those are worthy goals and they make up for the progressive tax they are proposing. In their view, salary over €1000 per month should be taxed with 26% in stead of 20%. If that 6% from some people helps provide all children free lunch, then I think it's worth it. They had a whole set of very expensive and very lucrative election promises and all those are impossible to turn into a reality any time soon. However, I believe most of their goals are a step closer to what Estonian people need. I really hope they don't get majority of votes because they are too socialist, but I do want to see them breathing down Reform Party's neck to remind them that country doesn't consist of only economy - there's people too.

Okay, now I'm all warmed up after the cold shower and I feel much better now that I have decided who to vote for.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Broken Horse

Theory confirmed - pregnancy cravings are a sign of bad diet! When I was pregnant with Siiri, I barely had any cravings. There was only my relentless appetite for oranges. I also had a very nice scheduled diet. In the morning I ate porridge and two fried eggs, at lunch I ate a full meal with lots of meat, a bit of carbohydrates (2-3 potatoes or a little pasta or rice), then a fruit in the afternoon, always roughly at the same time, and a then protein-heavy dinner with lots of delicious salad. I made sure I eat a lot of protein and very little carbs.

Now I eat all wrong. I often eat my morning porridge with jam or honey, I rarely eat eggs, my lunch is always different, but often without veggies. Even when I have my dinner, the meal which should probably contain around 40 g of pure protein to compensate for the rest of the day, I usually eat carbs covered with a sauce that has some small bits of meat in it and some hidden vegetables for Siiri's sake. Siiri has an extra meal of fruits and vegetables so she's better off than I am. Now I've started to dislike sweet things and foods with too much carbohydrates. Yesterday I sprinkled my porridge with cheese flakes in stead of jam. With my diet from hell, it's no wonder that I keep craving pizza, sushi and cheese.

Pizza is really quite healthy with a large variety of vegetables and with cheese full of good protein. The little bit of bread isn't any worse than pasta. Pizza's major problems are high fat percent and high sodium content. Well, at least fat doesn't play with blood sugar so it alone isn't really all that bad. Salt is another matter. Some say it's very bad for our health. But if it's so bad, how come I'm craving it so badly?! We have reduced the amount of salt we eat at home, mostly to avoid feeding Siiri too much salt. But the tiny amount we have reached apparently isn't enough for a growing fetus. Suddenly I add more salt to everything I eat. The last time me and Erkki ate sushi, I kept soaking the maki in soy sayce and commented that it must be diluted with water quite a bit, but Erkki said it's all in my head and the soy sauce feels very salty to him.

Yeah I eat sushi. Anyone who has a problem with a pregnant woman eating raw fish can just go and find out the odds of listeria. Some say that it's always best to choose the best for your baby and to avoid all risks but I think it's never good to blindly follow some paranoid rules that have been created "just in case". When we talk about risk and odds, consider that all pedestrian roads are covered with a thick crust of ice - slippery and uneven, sometimes tilted just for extra challenge. I'm not gonna stay indoors until spring to avoid the slippery roads where I could very easily fall and break a bone or two. The odds of me being one of the dozens of people EVERY DAY who visit hospital emergency room because of falling on the icy street are much greater than say, me being one of roughly 10 people in a YEAR who get listeria in Estonia. It's all about risk assessment.

I also still go to sauna, because Sunday sauna night has been such an important part of our weekly family ritual for a while now. There have been some changes though. In stead of 80-degree (Celsius) sauna, which is already quite low, we now go to 60-degree sauna. Any less than that and we risk catching a cold in there. I can't even wet my hair before I go in, the water won't have time to warm up and that's not comfortable at all. Also, I switched my cider to non-alcoholic. That is, after I found out I'm pregnant. No worries, I was very careful with alcohol already when I suspected I might be pregnant, including on new year's eve. I drank more water than alcoholic beverages. In some countries it's still recommended that women drink an occasional glass of red wine or a bottle of beer which is full of B-vitamins and I don't know of any studies showing that small amounts of alcohol really do any harm. I think it's okay to taste something with alcohol in it, but even a glass of wine seems quite a lot and it's best avoided during pregnancy.

There is one thing I maybe shouldn't have done - I stopped exercising when I thought I might be pregnant, which was an entire month before I actually was pregnant. I just felt really uncomfortable with the idea of heavy jumping and energetic kicking in all directions until I'm sweating and panting and then at the end of the song letting myself fall to the floor to catch my breath. That can't be good for a pregnancy. I think that's just tempting fate. I know exercise in moderation is okay, but me and moderation don't really get along that well, especially when pumped full of endorphins from the cool moves, great music and the best exercise coach.

I do miss exercising. I'm just starting to realize how much I need to exercise. I have gained weight, I spend much more time moping - for a while I thought I might be on my way toward depression, I avoid walking to work and back. The slippery ice is a good excuse for that, though, so it's easy to hide that I've simply gotten so very lazy. Some of the recent changes must be from pregnancy, but I remember pregnancy making me more positive rather than negative. Maybe it will get better over time. I'm already getting my appetite back and I feel much healthier than last week.

By now the title of this post must seem very odd. No I didn't mean that pregnant women are like broken horses if that's what you imagined! We have a borrowed rocking horse at home, which Siiri sometimes plays with. Yesterday she took hold of the handles and started rocking it gleefully. She didn't notice that every time she rocked it, the horse moved a bit further until one end got stuck under the radiator. The horse stopped rocking. Siiri tried another couple of times, then stated casually, "broken.". I was on the phone but I told her from further away, "Siiri, it's just stuck, it's not broken.". Siiri already walked away and laconically replied, "is.". That's almost like dialogue!

Siiri knows so many words already. I showed her pictures from her picture dictionary and I picked the kind of words she has never said. I'll translate the words: "Siiri, do you know what this is?" (elephant) - "E", "How about this?" (Owl) - "ow", "How about this one?" (butterfly) - "utty". Yeah sure, she was unable to say the full word, but it was obvious nearly every time that she knew what the word really was.

She also learned how to jump. It was the cutest thing ever to see her train for the first time. She squats really low, almost to the floor, then pushes herself up as high as possible and ends up on tiptoes, barely keeping her balance. Then she walks a couple of steps in a random direction swinging her arms, almost like athletes do when they're hyping themselves up before a big challenge, "I can do it, I can do it..." and then goes for another try. I don't know what motivated her but the first time I saw it she spent a whole lot of time trying. Eventually her legs were so tired she kept falling into a sitting position when she squatted. Now she's been practicing a bit more and she can jump an entire inch, sometimes even more. She's very excited about it and I'm very happy for her.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

I'm Pregnant

I haven't been quite honest with you. Or, more precisely, there's something I haven't told you - I'm pregnant. Currently it's barely less than 7 weeks and I know most people wait until they're walking around with a "basketball" under their shirt before they start hinting that they MIGHT be pregnant. That's so unlike me. Even the 3-week waiting time made me uneasy as if I have a big secret that I was really anxious to share. I had decided that I'll at least wait until after the doctor's appointment before I announce it on the Internet but after a while even that seemed exaggerated. I knew I couldn't be more pregnant with all the pregnancy symptoms and those three positive home tests. Yes, three! I had to be sure.

I don't know if it's a boy or a girl, I don't know if it's healthy or even viable. It's still so early in the pregnancy. However I do know that if something does go wrong, I don't want that to be my personal huge secret problem that no one even knows about.

If old wives tales mean anything then it's a boy. Mostly because I've been feeling my fair share of nausea this time around. With Siiri I had none of that. I'm also super tired all the time. It was only a couple of months ago when Erkki often came to remind me at 2 a.m. that it's getting kinda late and I hadn't even noticed. Now he often finds me asleep in front of Mass Effect (Xbox game) at 12 already and sometimes even earlier. I can't remember such exhaustion during my previous pregnancy, not even at 9 months pregnant.

Unfortunately this exhaustion isn't just physical. I'm having a really hard time focusing at work. It almost feels like I've had a concussion. Everything's in a blur and I just want to sleep. Mhh... Nausea is also one of the symptoms of concussion. At least I don't feel nauseous all the time. I feel a bit queasy in the first half of the day but quite okay after that. It's like that every day. When I pack my lunch in the morning I always think that I won't eat it and I wish I had something more appetizing to take with me, but during lunchtime I eat all of it and I'm sorry I didn't pack more food.

In the meanwhile, Siiri keeps getting wiser. She learns 2-3 new words in a day, although she can't remember all of them the next day. I also count the words that sound odd. Yesterday Siiri stepped in front of me and said, "Kaii". I asked, "käsi?" (Eng. hand) because she had her arms stretched out, but she seemed confused, and repeated, "Kaii!". I tried to figure out what she was pointing at: "Käsi? Lagi? Laud?(Eng. hand, ceiling, table) I'm sorry honey, I don't understand what you're trying to say." She gave up and started to walk away somewhat disappointed. Then I realized - she can't say the letter L and this was her version of "kalli" (Eng. hug). I quickly said, "hug! You were saying hug. Of course you can give me a hug!" and she stretched out her arms, ran back and gave me a hug. Adorable.

One time I was giving her a bubble bath. She sat there in the middle of a mountain of foam and toys and I was pouring water on her hair. Water level rose too high so I started to scoop out water and throwing it in the shower. Siiri panicked and tried to stop me, shouting "Whale! Whale!" (She says "aaaa" with specific intonation which stands for vaal, one of her favorite bath toys). I asked her, "Where is whale?". She sobbed and with a panicky look in her eyes pointed firmly toward the shower. I laughed and found her toy under the bath foam and gave it to her. After that she let me continue scooping water.

As time goes on Siiri's personality is more and more clear. She is a very daring person - she likes to try things that slightly scare her. She doesn't like being too close to Roomba when it's working but Siiri sometimes confronts her fear and hurries past Roomba simply for the challenge. She's also very careful. She rarely does anything dangerous after we've warned her of the dangers. She likes order. She sometimes insists that her letter cards would be put neatly in a symmetrical pattern. She's quite social and straightforward but that might just be age-related. She still doesn't feel comfortable around other children but I haven't had time to do much about it yet. I think she'll also somewhat grow out of it so I don't want to push her too hard. I can see Siiri as someone who stands up for her rights at any moment but only if she gets used to children her age.

We have raised Siiri to be independent and now it's becoming a blessing and a curse. It's not a problem for her to spend some time playing on her own. Yesterday I accidentally fell asleep for 2 hours and Siiri was just playing with her toys, rearranging the laundry basket in the living room, watching cartoons from youtube and doing whatever and seemed quite happy with her own time. But it's a curse because she doesn't want to be told what she should do. I don't like it when she spends much time watching cartoons, but sometimes she outright insists, "Paa! Siia." (iPad, here). I do understand that when something is important then no means no, but I'm not even sure it's such an important thing to forbid. It's almost like taking away her Legos because I want her to play spend time drawing in stead. I think the issue is not worth much drama and tears so I just distract her and offer an alternative activity. Still I kind of like that she has strong will even in issues that make my life more difficult. Strong-willed is always better than an obedient tag-along. She'll have much greater chance at success and happiness if we manage to raise her to be caring and respectful towards other people.

If the second kid is anything similar to Siiri, I'll consider myself a very lucky person.