Lili in the Kitchen - Kitchen tips for those who value cleanliness and health

- keep a toothbrush at the kitchen sink to keep your metal kitchen utensils really properly clean (but obviously make sure no one uses it for their teeth)

- a kitchen is no place for pets or children or pot plants or insects or cigarettes or dirty slobs (just F-off out of my kitchen!)

- no arses on table or bench tops (disgusting!)

- do not place full shopping bags on kitchen work surfaces (where have they been?)

- don't buy fruit and vegetables that you know will not be eaten within a few days, as compost belongs in the compost bin, not in the fridge or the fruit bowl

- go to your cutlery drawer, take out a fork, look between the prongs closely or with a magnifier glass, is the fork REALLY clean? No? Then don't ask me over for a meal, thanks.

- can openers of any type need to be washed after EVERY use

- can openers used to open pet food tins must not be used to open tins of food for human consumption

- plastic food utensils cannot be used in a frypan (you moron!)

- replace your kitchen dish-cloth daily

- do not use a dish-drainer on your sink that holds pools of mouldy water in it

- do not leave wet dishes stacked so that they don't drain properly

- do not rinse out a filthy used mop in the kitchen sink (no kidding, I've seen a mum do this at a playgroup meeting)

- don't serve unwashed, over-ripe or tasteless fruit to children (isn't it great when your little one picks up a piece of fruit from the playgroup kids' fruit plate and it still has a little sticker on it?)

- if you can't manage to clear your dirty dishes at least once a day, it's time to hire a cleaner, or give up cooking and live on restaurant food or takeaways, or book yourself into a nursing home or a residential care facility, or ask your folks if you can come back home

Lili in the Kitchen - Quest for a healthy-ish cake that tastes like marzipan

I've read that almonds are tremendously nutritious, so it's one of the foods that I'd like to get the kids to eat. I've tried sneaking almond meal into cake and brownie and pudding recipies, but it just tends to roughen the texture of things. The kids do love marzipan (what sane healthy person doesn't?), and for a long time I've been tricking the kids into eating healthy foods by using them furtively as cake ingredients, so I started looking for a cake recipe that has almond meal and tastes like marzipan. One would think that shouldn't be difficult, but it appears that marzipan isn't the flavour of the month, and doesn't come up the online data base of popular Australian recipes that I usually use. So then I thought, look up the company that makes almond essence. Good idea. I found a cake recipe that contains lots of almond meal, fresh orange, lots of eggs, but no butter, marg or oil and very little flour. It's nutrition ingeniously disguised as a cake, and the family all like it. Two tips for making this recipe: you can substitute real brandy for the brandy essence, and it would probably still have plenty of flavour without either, and even with a lined tin the bottom tends to burn, so you may wish to add 2 layers of brown paper or grease-proof paper to the base.

Almond and Orange Cake
from Queen Essenceshttp://www.queenessences.com.au/recipes/show.php?recipeid=10