From nail biter to nail care teacher - tips that work

I was a nail biter from a very young age. Now, I teach others how they can have beautiful nails, without spending a fortune. All you need is a little basic nail care. Soak your nails in oil for 10 minutes each day for one month. Whatever oil is in the kitchen pantry will do. Massage each nail in a circular motion (not back and forth) with the ball of the thumb. After the first month, this treatment is only needed once a month .

The next step is to treat nails weekly for the next six weeks . Cleanse them with a nail polish remover, again starting at the end of the nail bed and working down the nail to the tip. From here on, apply a simple protective barrier nail polish every day. In the beginning, the nail polish builds up as you are learning - do not worry or be concerned about that - just only do the nails once a week. Every week also file and buff the nails. Only do this once per week, as one can over process the nails (just as you can do with skin and so on).

I have ended up teaching nails care for 20 years and all of my clients who have followed handling correctly as well as the process are the proud owners of beautiful nails and hands!

Tomato paste doubles as cheap puree

Tomato paste saves me valuable dollars on buying puree! Whenever a recipe calls for tomato puree, I just use a sachet of tomato paste and then add water to it to make it up to whatever quantity of puree is required. It works as well and tastes just as good. I like to buy the Delmaine concentrated tomato paste, which comes in four little tubs of 70gm each. It is so versatile, and compared to tomato paste takes up far less room in the pantry!

Half price ricotta

Make your own ricotta cheese and save at least 50% on the inferior product you buy at the shops!
 
Whenever I buy ricotta cheese it usually goes off in the fridge while I figure out what to do with it! But recently, Better Homes and Gardens featured a very simple recipe for ricotta made from scratch.
 
Ingredients:
 
2L milk
4 tbsp white vinegar
 
Method:
 
Heat the milk until you see small bubbles at the side of the pan. Turn off the element and add the vinegar. Strain the curds off the top and then drain through a butter muslin cloth. Really easy!
 
Two litres of milk makes 500g of ricotta cheese. While in the deli the other day, I noticed they were charging $1.00 per 100g, or $10 a kilo! I shop at ALDI, which charges $2.20 for two litres of milk – that equates to $4.40 a kilo, less than half the price of store-bought ricotta. Plus, I no longer waste the product that I buy and never use. It also sounds super impressive when you tell people you make your own ricotta from scratch!

You can find the footage at http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/better-homes-gardens/tv/watch/-/6888083/ricotta/

An organised family is a happy family

In the spirit of getting organised for May, my tip has to do with letting go of control and coming up with organisational ideas that work with the people you love.

For example, my partner is a wonderful, talented individual who wouldn't know how to put away his clothes even if he was bribed! Clothing was constantly strewn over the floor, on the furniture or stuffed into cupboards and this drove me to distraction on more than one occasion.

Finally it dawned on me that the neatness issue was mine and the organising issue was his, so I discussed what would work best for him. I found out that he would prefer a single place to keep all his clothing, something portable and easy. I went away and, based on what he had told me, set up a system consisting of one large plastic tub on wheels and one small wicker basket. I placed both of these in the bottom of the wardrobe.

Clean clothes now go in the tub and dirty clothes in the basket. When the wicker basket is full, it goes in the wash; I made sure the basket was the same size as a machine load. When washed and dried, the clothes go from the basket back to the tub. Simple!

Now I have a clean bedroom and my partner can always find clean clothes. As a bonus, he's reduced his washing by two-thirds because he is only washing dirty clothes, not a mixture of clean and dirty.

Best of all, there is no longer friction surrounding the tidiness of the bedroom. The idea of working with those you love to create a harmonious living environment, where their needs and ways of doing things are heard and acted on really can have a positive impact, both financially and emotionally.