Mommy's Little Helper in the Training

Today's post is just a quick one as Mommy's afternoon is occupied with appointments.

Just last week Tuesday at night, Mommy did a quick treatment with the lime fruits that Mommy bought from Econsave. Actually, Mommy should have done this 'treatment' earlier, but had been postponing it for about a week or so after buying them (blame it on low motivation after long hours at work!). Now with the thought that 'rotting' is not too far away, Mommy's motivation to 'do something' picks up again.


Mommy bought this big handful of limau kasturi for cooking purposes. Usually for the kind of dishes that Mommy cooks, the juice of limau kasturi is to add a tangy twist to canned sardine dishes, assam prawns cooked with bird's eye chillies and also as one of the ingredients for a prawn marinade. Before this, Mommy would just buy a small amount and store in the fridge's drawer in special green plastic bags that are supposed to prolong the shelf-life of veges and fruits. However, this shelf-life prolongation thing has a limit. And sometimes it's just not practical to purposely buy a lime fruit or two whenever Mommy needs to cook a dish that uses it. But then again, buying according to needs is not cost-effective in the long run because you will be subjected to the highs and lows of the market price at any one time you need to buy it. So that 's why Mommy has finally decided to spare some time to make bulk preparation of lime juice for long term storage, usage and cost-effectiveness. And in view of the future too, Mommy has decided to train this Little Boy to be Mommy's Little Helper for few reasons:

• to train him to help Mommy do some housework so that next time when he's older, he knows how to help around without being told (hopefully!)
• to let him develop his motor skills and hand-eye coordination
• to let him 'play' (while doing the real thing) since he likes to play masak-masak (cooking) with his toys
• this is part of Mommy's long-term effort to delegate household tasks since children are still easy to mould at this stage (this relates to the first bullet point as well!)
• this will be a great help to his future wife next time! ^_^

First, using a cleaver, Mommy halved all the lime fruits. Then using a garlic crusher, Mommy demonstrated to Juan Or by putting in a half-fruit and then bringing the handles together to squeeze the juice out into a mug. After that, discard the lime debris and repeat the whole procss again.

Now it's Juan Or turn to do all this. ^_^

Putting in the lime into the garlic crusher........

Then squeeeeeeezeeeeee........

To make sure all juice is squeezed out, add more strength - "Eeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!"

After that, let Mommy pick up the lime debris to throw away......hehehehe!

To make the juice 'cleaner', Mommy strained the juice into another clean mug.

Here's the final yield - the limau kasturi juice!

For long-term storage, Mommy covered the mug with a plastic cap salvaged from a Mr. Potato canister......

.....and store it in the freezer. Voila! The lime juice will be thawed (and refrozen) as and when needed.

By the way, Juan Or only managed to sit through the squeezing process for about 15 to 20 minutes only, after which he told Mommy he wanted to join Papa upstairs to enjoy the air-cond and play with his choo-choo trains. *Smirk on the face*