Monthly Archives: November 2018

How to green up your condo

Becoming the Sustainability Manager of a property management company wasn’t something that I anticipated going into after doing coral reef ecology and fisheries-related research around the Philippines. But now that I’m here, I appreciate the opportunity (and challenge! huhu) to influence hundreds of property managers, and by extension, the hundreds of thousands of residents, office tenants, and mallgoers that they interact with on a daily basis.

Last month, I was approached by Speed to write an article on green condo living for their November issue. Speed describes itself as “the technology magazine for the fast-paced lifestyle, bringing together not only the most up-to-date tech news, interesting features, and informative columns”. November is typically their Green Technology issue, and I’d already written something on sustainable living for their 2016 issue (you can read it  here). This new article was my chance to promote sustainable property management practices to a wider audience, so OF COURSE I wrote it.

Read the full article here:

Here’s hoping a lot of condo residents read this and start supporting practices in their own buildings 🙂

Lessons from the mixing bowl

One of the things I never thought I’d actually do was learn how to bake. Sure, I love to eat delicious baked goods (who doesn’t?), but after a disastrous attempt to bake my mom a birthday cake when I was 13 years old, I’d stayed as far away from an oven as possible.

Fast forward twenty years later and surprise: baking is now something I do for *gasp* fun! No, really. I bought a small electric oven last Christmas because I wanted to eat healthier and stop frying everything. Little did I know that with the baked vegetables, fish, and chicken would come cookies, cheesecakes, and muffins. Oh, the irony of it all.

Aside from the end goal of actual baked goods to eat, the process of baking lends itself to additional valuable lessons:

1. Be patient. The typical chocolate chip cookie recipe calls for you to scoop the cookie dough onto baking sheets and refrigerating the dough for at least an hour, but best for at least 24 hours. But why? Why have cookies tomorrow when you can have them today? As it turns out, refrigerating the cookies stops them from spreading out too much and also brings out more of the flavor. More patience = more delicious cookies.

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2. Learn the ropes first before trying to tweak anything. Baking is that delicious blend of science and art. Unlike dishes where you can play with the recipe on the fly, baked goods need exact recipes because each ingredient reacts with everything else. Yes, substituting 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder with 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda when you change the recipe from 1 cup of milk to 1 cup of yogurt makes an absolute difference. Once you’ve mastered the basics and the ingredients, then you can change the recipe.

I learned this lesson the hard way when I figured hey, two medium eggs were the same as one large egg, right? Wrong. What were supposed to be eight cookies merged into a single huge COOKIE. The batter was too wet and thus spread too much. The cookie tasted fine, but still. Since then, the most off-recipe thing I’ve done so far is double the vanilla extract and cinnamon because I wanted a stronger flavor. I’ll get to the recipe development stage eventually. *crosses fingers*

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