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How to Dust Your Furniture

Friday, May 2, 2008

Dusting furniture should be one of the easiest chores to do. But, given how many dusty bachelor pads I’ve seen (my own included), it would seem that it’s a pretty complicated task.

Of course, we know that dusting isn’t really complicated. The main reason that it doesn’t get done is sheer laziness. With that in mind, here are a few tips to help you dust less often, but still keep your home as dust free as possible.

Random duster
Creative Commons License photo credit: chatirygirl

What is Dust?

Before we begin with the tips, let’s talk about what dust is. You may think that it’s dirt from outside: muck tracked in on your shoes, or airborne filth flown in throw an open window. While this is partially true, most dust is actually dead skin and hair.

Because most of the dust in your home comes from your own body, keeping your windows closed and leaving your dirty shoes outside won’t keep your home free of dust.

How to Dust

The act of dusting is pretty easy. Just grab your feather duster and start swishing it around, right?

Wrong.

Unless your duster has a static charge, it will just move the dust around. Most of the dust will get kicked up into the air for you to breath in. Whatever you don’t inhale will just settle on other surfaces in the room, so an old fashioned feather duster just won’t do.

While you could buy disposable, Swiffer-style dusters to pick up the dust, this can get expensive and it creates unnecessary waste.

The easiest and cheapest way to dust, then, is to use a damp cloth to wipe down any surfaces that need dusting. This will actually pick up the dust, instead of just stirring it up, so it will help keep the frequency of your dusting to a minimum.

For surfaces that you don’t want to use a damp cloth on, such a bookshelf full of books, you can use a dry cloth or a feather duster to brush off the dust.

Do your best to make sure that this dust lands on the floor, instead of on a surface you’ve just finished dusting, and then vacuum the floor immediately afterward to prevent that dust from getting kicked up as you walk around.

Alternatively, if you’re willing to spend a few extra dollars, you can buy a microfibre cloth. Anyone who wore a pair of cargo pants made out of the stuff in the late ’90s will know that microfibre is a dust magnet.

Using a microfibre cloth will allow you to pickup the dust from most surfaces in your home without having to wet the cloth. This will be especially helpful for those surfaces—like the book-filled bookshelf—that you don’t want to get wet.

Regardless of whether you use a damp cloth or a cloth made of microfibre, you should still vacuum after dusting. No dusting tool is perfect, so it’s best to give the carpets a good once-over with the vacuum to make sure you’ve picked up any dust that may have hit the floor while you were dusting.

Summary

  • Don’t use a feather duster.
  • Use a damn cloth or a microfibre cloth.
  • Make sure to vacuum after dusting.

Follow these simple tips and you shouldn’t have to dust very often. You can be almost as lazy as if you don’t dust at all, with the added bonus of not having to breath in little bits of your own dead skin.

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How to Clean Your Apartment in 1 Hour or Less

Monday, April 28, 2008

Of all the chores that bachelors must endure, cleaning our apartments is possibly the worst. A lot of guys enjoy cooking. A few guys even enjoy doing the laundry. But I have never met a guy who enjoys cleaning. I’ve met a few women who find cleaning house to be a very therapeutic activity, but I think that they’re among the minority.

Most of us, men and women alike, hate to clean. What’s the solution? For most of us, it involves procrastinating until our apartments are so filthy and smelly that we have no choice. A few of us—those with a large disposable income—might hire a maid.

While both of these are options, the first isn’t particularly attractive, and the second isn’t affordable for most of us. The better solution: the one hour (or less) apartment clean-up.

thursday evening
Creative Commons License photo credit: miss pupik

Cleaning Often Means Cleaning Less

If you wait until your kitchen counters have grown mold and your toilet has developed it’s own ecosystem, it’s going to take a long time to clean everything. The best way to clean your apartment is to do a little bit each day.

Cleaning only one room per day will make it easy to keep your apartment clean with an hour or less of work each day. Once you get a good system going, you’ll find that you can usually spend less than an hour per week cleaning.

Alternately, instead of cleaning one room per day, you can do just one chore per day. For example, you can do all of your vacuuming one day, clean the toilet the next, do the dusting on yet another day, and so on.

Quick Tips

In addition to doing only one room and/or one chore per day, there are other ways that you can cut back on the amount of time that you spend cleaning. Here are a few of the tricks I use to keep my place clean without spending too much time with a sponge in my hand:

  • Use a daily shower cleaner: For the cost of about $4 a bottle, you can pick up a bottle of daily shower spray. This stuff makes cleaning your shower so much easier. Instead of scrubbing the tiles once a week, you just spray the shower stall down after you shower each morning and walk away—no scrubbing required. While it works best if you start with a clean shower, you can start with a dirty shower too, it’ll just take longer before you start to see results. Most bottles of daily shower cleaner will last for about 4 weeks. That means that, for the cost of about $1 per week, you can avoid ever having to scrub those tiles again.
  • Use a “no scrubbing necessary” cleaner: Just as there are daily shower cleaners that require no scrubbing, there are a variety of cleaning solutions for other surfaces that don’t require scrubbing. While these are generally more expensive than those cleaners that do require scrubbing, you’d be surprised by the amount of time they can save. Not only that, if you’re not scrubbing, cleaning feels like less work, so you’ll be less likely to put it off.
  • Dust before you vacuum: Yes, you have to dust your shelves, tables, and other flat surfaces. Yes, it is a pain in the rear. But, make sure to do it before you vacuum. If you do it after you vacuum, all of the dust you’ve just stirred up will settle on the carpet, and just get kicked back up onto the surfaces you just dusted once you start walking around. If you do it before you vacuum, then you’ll vacuum up all of the dust, and you won’t have to dust again for quite a while (unless, like me, you have dark-coloured furniture. Then, unfortunately, you’ll have to dust at least once a week, since dust is more apparent on dark surfaces).
  • Buy a Roomba: If you can afford to buy your own robot vacuum cleaner, I highly recommend it. I can’t afford one myself, but I hope to get one eventually. Having a robot that vacuums for you means never having to do it yourself. Obviously, this will save you a significant amount of time in the long run. If you are feeling extra wealthy, get a Scooba and you’ll be free of mopping as well. If you’re wondering how I can recommend something I haven’t used myself, let me say that I know more than one person who owns a Roomba, and not one of them has regretted the purchase.

Helpful Links

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How to Make a Better Burger

Friday, April 25, 2008

For many bachelors, a burger is something you buy from a fast food restaurant. While there are some really good fast food burgers out there, it’s a shame that more bachelors don’t know how to cook a decent burger on their own.

Too often, a bachelor burger consists of a pre-made patty that came from the frozen food section, cooked in a frying pan with oil. That’s got to be the worst possible way to make a burger. Ignoring that prepared patties are rarely as good as those you can make with fresh meat, frying a burger means you’re going to end up with a really greasy sandwich.

Bison Burger 3

Cooking Method

Ideally, a burger should be cooked on a grill. Obviously, a BBQ is the ideal option, but a lot of apartment dwellers don’t have balconies, so you may not have the option of using a proper BBQ to cook your burgers. If you’re in this situation, don’t despair.

There are a number of indoor grills that can do the job just as well. The only difference is that an indoor grill won’t give you the smoky taste that a true BBQ will.

If you have no access to a grill, and you can’t afford to buy one, the next best option is to broil the burger on a broiling pan (that weird corrugated thing in the drawer under your oven).

The reason that you want to grill or broil your burger is so that the grease drips off while it’s cooking, instead of pooling around the meat like it does in a frying pan. This will result in a burger that not only tastes better, but that is healthier for you.

Preparing the Meat

Before you cook the burger, you’ll need to prepare the meat.

As mentioned, the best tasting burgers will be made from fresh ground meat. However, I have no problem using previously frozen meat (it’s almost as good as fresh), or even pre-made patties if you don’t have time to make them yourself.

If you have the time to make your own patties, I highly recommend it. It doesn’t take as long as you might think, so it’s not a big inconvenience even when compared to using pre-made patties.

There are a lot of ways that you can prepare your meat. Some people like to add filler to their patties, for example. I generally don’t like to do this, but if that’s your style, go ahead.

I’ve had some great burgers that used unconventional fillers like crumbled corn flakes, so feel free to experiment with fillers. It’ll let you stretch your meat further, and it can result in patties with a variety of unique flavours and textures that you wouldn’t get from just using the meat by itself.

However, as I said, I prefer not to use filler, most of the time. Instead, I like to take ground meat (as lean as possible, to avoid shrinkage on the grill) and form it into patties, occasionally adding an egg or two to help hold the raw meat together (the leaner your meat, the more likely it’ll be that you’ll need to add egg to it).

Once that’s done, you can throw those patties on the grill!

What Kind of Meat?

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been referring to ground meat instead of ground beef. That’s because a burger doesn’t have to be made out of beef. That’s the most popular choice, but there are number of meats that can be used to make good burgers.

  1. Beef - This is the traditional choice of meat for making burgers. It’s tasty, and as long as you use lean or extra lean beef, it’s relatively healthy. If you don’t feel like experimenting, ground beef is the ideal choice for a burger.
  2. Turkey - Ground turkey has been gaining popularity as a low-fat alternative to beef. It’s mostly used in place of hamburger in things like Hamburger Helper dishes, but I’ve also heard of it being used to make burgers. Having never made a turkey burger, I can’t really tell you if it tastes good or not.
  3. Lamb - Lamb burgers are not overly common, but I have seen them on restaurant menus. I’ve never tried one, nor have I even made one, so I’m not able to comment on the taste, but lamb is a potential burger meat.
  4. Elk - This is probably not the most common meat out there and, unless you’re a hunter, you might not be able to get any. That said, elk farms are becoming more common, so if you may be able to find some elk meat in your local farmers’ market or organic food store. Much like bison (see below), elk is a surprisingly lean red meat, and is healthier than even many white meats. Because it is leaner than beef, it will cook quicker, and you’ll need to take care not to dry it out by over-cooking it.
  5. Bison - Bison is probably the healthiest red meat there is. It’s incredibly lean, has far fewer calories than beef, but it’s got more iron and more Vitamin B12. It has a unique taste, but it’s fairly close to beef. Because it is very lean, it can dry out when cooking. To avoid this, you may want to add BBQ sauce or another flavoured sauce to the meat when you’re making your patties. Personally, I think ground bison is the best burger meat. However, it’s a bit more expensive than beef, and may not be commonly available in your area.

Cooking the Burgers

As I mentioned above, you should be cooking your burgers on a grill whenever possible. But, even if you use a grill, you can end up with a dry, relatively flavourless burger if you aren’t careful. Here are a few tips to avoid that:

  • Don’t flatten the patties - The biggest mistake people make when cooking a burger is to squish down the patty with their flipper. I don’t know why people do this. Is it because of the satisfying sizzle you hear when the grease hits the flame? Whatever the reason, don’t do this! Flattening the patty squeezes out all of the juice. This dries out your burger. A well-cooked burger should be juicy, so drying it out is counter-intuitive. Much of the flavour in a burger is in the juice, too, so squeezing out the juice is the same as squeezing out the flavour.
  • Flip only once (this applies to beef only) - If you’re making a beef burger, it is best to flip the burger only once. Cooking times will obviously vary depending on how thick you make your patties, but a good estimate is 5 minutes per side on medium heat, without squeezing the patty down. I believe that this rule will also apply to lamb but, having never made a lamb burger, I’m not sure. Bison and elk are much leaner meats, and have a tendency to dry out if you aren’t careful. To avoid this, flip burgers made from these meats regularly but, again, don’t squish the patty! Because turkey is very lean, I assume the flip-frequently rule applies here also, but I’ve never cooked a turkey burger, so I can’t say for sure.
  • Prevent sticking - If your grill is hot enough, your meat shouldn’t stick too much, but it’s possible for a patty to stick even to the hottest of grills. To avoid this, you can either spray the grill with Pam or another anti-stick spray (do this before you light the grill), or you can brush a bit of olive oil onto the patty (this is what I recommend).

Simple Bison Burger Recipe

Because Bison is my favourite burger meat, I figured I’d share a very simple recipe for bison burgers. I have tried this myself, so I can attest to the fact that it is an incredible tasting burger. In fact, after cooking this recipe for the first time, I knew I had tasted the best burgers I have ever made.

The recipe is incredibly simple. In fact, there are only two ingredients:

  • Ground bison meat - 454g (1 lb.)
  • Roasted-pepper pesto - 2-3 teaspoons (approx.)

To prepare this recipe, pre-heat your grill to about medium heat. A slightly lower temperature than you’d normally use for beef burgers will be best, to avoid over-cooking the leaner bison meat.

While the grill is preheating, mix the pesto and bison together, and form the mixture into patties.

Once the grill has reached the desired temperature, simply put the patties on the grill and flip them regularly until they are cooked. Depending on the thickness of your patties, and the temperature of your BBQ, they should take about 5-8 minutes per side to cook.

Once the patties are cooked, put them on a hamburger bun and top them with your favourite condiments.

Makes 2-3 patties.

Note: All cooking times are approximate, and refer to burgers that are well-done. If you prefer your burgers rarer than that, you’ll have to adjust your cooking time accordingly.

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