Cleaning Your Oven with Ammonia

"Easy Oven Cleaning Tip! No more harsh chemicals to clean your oven! Just use ammonia"

 Before I start, just to get this out of the way. YES, it does work. That's not what makes this a bad idea though. Ammonia is a household item that, as the decades pass, become rarely seen in most peoples houses. There's a very good reason for that actually. You see, as much as people assume a single ingredient cleaner is less harsh or scary than those modern cleaners that have a mile long ingredient list, that's not always the case. In fact, cleaning your oven with ammonia can be far more dangerous and harmful than the infamous spray-on oven cleaner most of us know.

 Let's look at this commonly touted pin/life hack.

1. Preheat to 200° then turn off. 
2. In a heat safe glass dish, fill with ammonia and set on middle rack (about 1 to 2 cups of ammonia). 
3. In another dish, fill with boiling water and set on bottom rack (2 cups). 
4. Leave overnight. 
5. The next morning, remove dishes and wipe down the inside with a hot wet sponge

There's a few problems right off the bat with this: there's no mention whatsoever of using gloves or proper ventilation. Ammonia is highly caustic and toxic and can be extremely harmful to your skin, eyes and lungs. In fact a woman in Denmark was sent into a coma from cleaning her oven this way. Which brings up another fact to keep in mind - ammonia is sold in varying strengths, from 2% to 10%, in different countries. This little life hack is meant to be used with the weaker variants found in countries like the US. When you heat up ammonia it stands a good chance of vaporizing, which is extremely dangerous. Vaporized ammonia not only can burn your eyes and lungs, it can kill you if you inhale enough (by, say, sticking your head in an oven trying to clean it).

The fact is, ammonia really isn't better for you or the environment from other forms of oven cleaners. You might look at the ingredients of such products as Easy Off and balk at what it contains, but when you read over just how bad ammonia actually is, you quickly realize that one isn't better than the other. In fact, modern day oven cleaners tend to have far fewer--if any--fumes, something ammonia surely can't claim. Not only that, if you use various other cleaners in your house, you have to be extremely careful to never EVER mix ammonia with anything that contains bleach. That can cause a reaction that produces fumes that can quite literally kill you.

In my opinion, there's a very good reason many housewives started ditching such cleaners like ammonia in favor of the modern cleaners that started appearing in the mid century and soon took over our homes. All in all, this is just not a good idea. There are many other, safer ways to clean your oven.

Good Idea Friday - How To Clean Really Stubborn Pots and Pans

Saving a Ruined Le Creuset Pan : Squidyboo

So as some of you probably know from reading my blog, I am not a baker. At all. In fact my husband has pretty much banned me from using the oven after countless kitchen fires from my attempts at baking. But where as I can't bake, I can cook. Really well I might add.

But even the best cooks make mistakes, and that is how I was faced with a dilemma some time back (which is why this post is lacking photos, sorry!)

You see, I was using one of my beloved Le Creuset pans and ended up burning the risotto terribly. It's bad enough ruining dinner, but the idea I may have ruined a $200 pan was more than I could bare. I tried to clean it best I could by soaking it and using a melamine sponge (Magic Eraser). That barely touched it. I then tried Barkeeper's Friend, which again didn't do much, so I tried straight up baking soda, but the black remained stuck to the bottom of my pan.

So what to do? I spent quite some time doing research and seeing what other sites would recommend. I wanted to be careful not to ruin the pan by cleaning it (so oven cleaner was right out, though that does work on things like uncoated stainless steel just fine)

Well after reading a lot of forums on pan care I found the blog post over at Squidgyboo. Looks like we were in the same boat. She tested out 3 different ways of cleaning her Le Creuset, and had best results with... boiling water and baking soda?

Seriously? How is that going to work when scrubbing the damn thing with baking soda didn't work? But I was desperate and willing to try anything at this point. And wouldn't you knowit, it worked! I took about a half hour of effort, but it worked. I skipped her suggestion of a butter knife since my pan is my baby and I was worried about to ruin it, and went with a wooden spatula (rice paddle, really) instead.

So here's the trick: 

Take your baked on possibly ruined pan or pot and place it on the stove. Add 1-2" of water and bring to a gentle boil. Grab your baking soda and add about 1/2-1 cup. It will fizz. This is good. Take your wood spatula and gently start working the spot or burned on area. After a short time it'll start to flake up. If it stops flaking, add more baking soda. Once the water gets too nasty or stops fizzing when more baking soda is added, dump and start again.

That's it. I have tried this before using just water with mixed results, but I noticed a huge difference once I brought in the baking soda. So go out there and test this on any pans you may think are ruined. And if you have any other great tips on saving baked on, burnt on, pots and pans, let us know! Leave your comments and photos on our facebook or twitter page.

Good Idea Friday - The Truly BEST Fruit Fly Trap

Fruit Fly Trap : Wormilicious

That's a pretty bold statement in the title, I know. And today's Good Idea Friday didn't come from Pinterest (sorry!) but it's so amazing that it should be on Pinterest.

A few weeks ago we woke up to a to a huge fruit fly invasion, out of the blue. Apparently they are really common this time of year. We spent the day cleaning the kitchen really well, setting out glasses of wine with a few drops of dish soap in it, and figured that would take care of that.

We were wrong. Very wrong. By the next day, they had invaded every room of the house. I was so skeeved out I wanted to run out of my house screaming. So we spent all day doing a huge deep cleaning of the entire house, setting houseplants outside, pouring boiling water down the drains, trying the paper cone method that is fairly popular. We even set out bowls of fruit and vinegar, with plastic wrap over it with holes poked in.

By day three however, it was apparent nothing was working. None of the traps seemed to work. They just hung out on the rim of the soap laced glasses, and very few ventured into the paper cone method or plastic wrapped bowls. We talked of bug bombing the house, because at this point I couldn't even pour myself a glass of wine without having fruit flies instantly descend into the glass.

But as luck would have it, we didn't need to bug bomb the house. Instead, we grabbed the fly tape. Yes, the cheap fly tape you can get at the dollar store. We hung it over the sink with a glass of wine below it, and waited. By the next morning, there were noticeably less fruit flies flying around, and the fly tape was honestly disgusting looking it. By day two of having the fly tape up, we were pretty much fruit fly free.

Unfortunately my husband and I were so grossed out by the sight of the fly tape that we tore it down before I got a photo of it for the blog, but trust me when I say this is by far the quickest easiest method I've ever tried to get rid of fruit flies. I decided to do a google search and was amazed to only find one blog post about this method. Over at Wormilicious, she builds a really ingenious trap using fly tape as well. In fact, my husband was trying to figure out how to get a fly tape around the glass to begin with. I think next time we end up with an invasion on our hands, we're going to try her method.

Post Update: I've also had a few people ask about where to get sticky tape for the fruit fly trap. I found some just the other day at Winco actually, but I assume most hardware stores will carry it. It's actually marketed as a window tape for flies, it comes in a little package that reminded me of those hand warmers you find around winter time.  And of course you can find it on amazon if you don't feel like hauling yourself to the hardware store.

Good Idea Friday - Cleaning your Whiteboards

I was honestly highly skeptical about this tip. I'm in the middle of preparing for a yard sale this week, and I stumbled acrossed a cute whiteboard that used to be in my kids' playroom. The problem? It had been sitting in the basement for over a year covered in ink. Yikes. So I did what I always do - I busted out my trusty  melamine sponge (Magic eraser). That worked ok, but the board itself seemed stain from the ink. So I took it into the bathroom and applied a thick paste of bleach gel. A day later, and it was still stained. 

So I turned to pinterest. I knew I had seen a post before on how to clean whiteboards, but I assumed they all offered the same advice I had just tried. Until I found this post from over at the blog Milehimama. 

Her suggestions? Toothpaste. Yes, cheap, old school toothpaste. A similar tip to my post on how to clean your headlights I wrote about. But can it do the work my melamine sponge couldn't? I was highly skeptical. So I tried it on half the board and sure enough it worked! Knowing then that it was the grit of the paste and not the toothpaste itself, I tried a cup of baking soda with a wet cloth on the other half, and it worked just as well. So next time you're staring down a not so whiteboard and thinking it's a lost cause, break out the baking soda or toothpaste and give it a try. 

Good Idea Friday - Clean Your Dishwasher!

DIY dishwasher repair : The Quick and The Hungry

This is a pin that hits close to home for me. We renovated our kitchen just 2 years ago, and got a new dishwasher. It worked great the first 6 months, and after that it slowly but surely was giving up. Nothing we tried seemed to work, and I was sure my dishwasher had kicked it. I started having to hand washing my dishes and referred to the dishwasher as a $500 drying rack, because that was all it was good for. Well my husband decided to basically take everything out of it, including the filters to see if he could fix it... and that's when we discovered the problem. It was so clogged up with ickiness (not to mention a couple toothpicks, broken glass, and a 2" screw) that I'm amazed it was still able to run at all.

So today's good idea comes from The Quick and The Hungry blog, which I found on pinterest. She gives a great step by step guide on how to clean and maintain your dishwasher. Often times all it takes is a good deep cleaning to get your dishwasher up and running like new again. I've made it a to do now every 6 months to deep clean my dishwasher. I'd highly recommend looking up the manual of your dishwasher (most companies offer the manual in PDF format online) to better locate the filters and how to remove them - The problem we had with ours is that it in fact contained TWO filters, not one, so even though we had cleaned out one, the other remained clogged with gunk.

Good Idea Friday - How to Polish Silver With Ease

To polish silver: Wash items, then place on aluminum foil in the bottom of a pot. Add a baking-soda solution (1 cup soda, a few teaspoons salt, 1 quart boiling water) and cover for a few seconds. The result? A chemical reaction that gets the black off the gravy boat. 

I work with silver on a daily basis at my day job as a jeweler, so I not only have every tool imaginable to polish silver, I also have heard the crazy way people clean their jewelry. Everything from mouthwash to toothpaste has been mentioned to me. But this, this is not only a really amazingly simple way to clean jewelry or silver dishes, flatware and vases, it WORKS. This is honestly how I polish 99% of the items that come to me highly tarnished.

Before we get into the how to, lets talk about what tarnish on silver is. Tarnish is basically a thin layer of the silver that is corroded away. Because of this it's very important - especially for antique or silver plated items - that you try your hardest to prevent tarnish in the first place. Something as simple as tarnish preventing strips or a tarnish resistant bag is perfect for that. The more tarnished a piece gets, the more times you have to polish it, the more damage is done to the finish. Especially with silver plated items, which often just have a thin silver coating over base metal like nickel, this is important, otherwise over time the silver will fade away leaving the darker base metal exposed.

 I would highly suggest testing this on just a spot if you're working with an antique or silver plated item. Just an FYI.

So lets  get down to it - how to polish silver pieces with out scrubbing, buffing, or nasty smelling polishes.

Simply layer a small glass dish or sink depending on the size of the items with aluminum foil, set your pieces on the foil, add in a handful or 2 of baking soda and cover with boiling water.

Yep. That's it.  I guess I should also mention that often times you will smell sulfur when you do this - don't worry. The tarnish is produced by sulfur. In fact in jewelry making we USE sulfur to pre-darken pieces.

Why does this work though? Well the science nerd in me loves knowing why things like this work, and I found a great write up here about it. Basically the sulfur producing the tarnish is more drawn to the aluminum than it is the silver, so with the add of the hot water and baking soda, it transfers to that instead of staying on the silver.

Oh and for those who have seen this pin that also states in all caps "BE VERY CAREFUL IT WILL EAT YOUR HANDS AND THROUGH RUBBER GLOVES!" I have to laugh at that. NO, no it won't. The only side effect of this is highly polished silver and faint sulfur smell in the air. It's perfectly safe to use and I often times use my bare hands to fish the finished pieces from the water.

Good Idea Friday - Kool-Aid For Your Dishes

"Just use a pack of Lemonade Kool-aid to clean your dishwasher" 

Before you all click away thinking I've lost my mind--stick with me on this. It is a good idea. Sort of at least. Why? Because of the citric acid found in the drink mix. 

So first off, let's talk about what is citric acid. It's an organic acid that is oftentimes is used in foods to create that 'zing' or sour taste, and also as a preservative in things like canning fruits. (It can also be used in everything from bath salts to drink tablets to help create fizz) 

In cleaning it is used as a descaler and very useful in removing lime and mineral buildup and softens water. Which is why it works so well in your dishwasher.  Often times, especially if you live in an area with naturally mineral rich water or hard water, you dishwasher can get clogged over time with build up. 

In my research I was curious though as to just how MUCH citric acid is in Kool-Aid. For all I knew it was just a small amount, making this worthless as you'd need to add a lot of packets to get the desired effect. But I found several science papers on the content of citric acid in Kool-Aid. Who knew? Apparently it's a common item in high school chem classes!  These papers state that the content of citric acid and ascorbic acid (vitamin C) is 100:1 ratio. The size of a package of Kool-aid is .23 oz, and costs about 10-20 cents a pack. 

Not to mention you can buy straight-up citric acid online for around $16 for a two pound jug. Doing the math on that, that is the same as spending around $27 for the same amount in the Kool-Aid packs, and without all the other stuff (flavors, dyes) that are found in the mix. So you're actually getting a far better deal buying just citric acid than you would buying the Kool-Aid. 

If you've ever used lemon juice to descale your kettle or coffee pot, you can see how powerful citric acid is in cleaning. So yes, this is a good idea, and yes, Kool-aid will work, but you're better off keeping Kool-Aid on the shelf and just reaching for pure citric acid instead. Most grocery stores carry it, if not by name then as "Sour Salt", it's often kept in the canning section of your store. And you can use it elsewhere besides your dishwasher--you can even mix some with hot water in a zip top baggie, place over your clogged shower head and tie in place. Leave over night and it's build up free by morning. Anywhere you get mineral build up can be cleaned with citric acid (think of if it as a more natural CLR for the house).

Good Idea Friday - Toothpaste on Your HeadLights

"How to Clean Your Car Headlights-with toothpaste"

This post is for a fan who asked how true this was. 

(Have questions or submissions? Post it on our facebook page!) 

So, can toothpaste of all things really clean your car's headlamps? Yes. Oddly enough. However there are a lot of things that can, so I'll explain how and why it works. Things like this often times will stress that it must be toothpaste, not the more modern gel styles of toothpaste. Why? Because more traditional toothpastes tend to have a higher grit content - if you put some on your fingers and rub them together, you can feel the difference between toothpaste and tooth gel. The gel has a much smoother gel like consistency. It's the grit of the old fashion toothpaste (bonus points if it's something with baking soda) that is what is really cleaning the headlamps. 

You can get the same effect using a dozen different things from around the house - a water and baking soda mix, a magic eraser, Bon Ami cleaner, etc. The goal is to cut through the grim and oil and dirt, which ultimately needs something with a bit of texture to clean away but not enough to scratch the glass of the light. This works well for a lot of things that need a little extra cleaning help - from your oil splattered toaster to the top of your cookstove to the rubber white soles of your converse shoes. 

So what do you think? Good idea? In a pinch I'd use it, but I'm sticking with my tried and loved melamine sponge (aka Magic Eraser) for this personally. I don't think my headlights care if they are minty fresh or not. 

Magic Toilet Cleaner

Magic Eraser uses... did you know you can cut a piece off and float it in your toilet overnight and voila! no more toilet ring! The website has a list of about 100 uses!

Magic Erasers.. they clean like magic. I honestly love these things and use them in place of typical sponges on most everything. (Though I personally prefer the generics.)

But will they be so magical as to do the work for you? 

No. No they won't. You can't just cut up a sponge, toss it in the toilet, and expect to wake up to having the bowl cleaned for you magically over night. The way these sponges work are that they are basically like super fine sandpaper (which is why they tell you never to use on skin. Though I'm surprised I haven't seen it posted a great DIY micro dermabrasion facial on pinterest yet.) So you actually need to scrub with these. Plus you still need to fish that out of your toilet come morning anyways so wouldn't it be easier just to clean it the old fashion way?

Honestly if you keep your toilet fairly clean then in a pinch you can add anything from your usual bowl cleaner, bleach, or even baking soda and let it sit over night and then just flush in the morning to get rid of the ring.  I've also read where people have had good results with the old 3rd grade science fun of mixing equal parts baking soda and vinegar to clean with out scrubbing. However if you have hard water or mineral build up that isn't responding to the usual cleaner and brush it's best to slap on the industrial rubber gloves, grab a pumice stone and get scrubbing. 

Good Idea Friday - Use Coffee Filters to Clean Glass

I got this tip from a follower on Facebook (like us!) and at first I was skeptical. I don't use coffee filters since I have a french press, so I wasn't able to test this one out myself. But then I thought about it and realized... of course this would work! 

Why? Coffee filters are designed to get wet, but won't lint up or fall apart unlike things like paper towels. When I worked in art galleries we would use medical Kimwipes to clean the glass, as it also helped with streaking and didn't leave fibers or dust on the glass. Kimwipes are a bit thinner and bigger in size, but the paper quality is about the same as a coffee filter. If you have coffee filters on hand anyways, this would be a great alternative use for them. Another easy way to get clean, streak free windows is to simply use a squeegee. 

Good Idea Friday - Peroxide and Washing Soda

I'm usually skeptical when it comes to all the "make it yourself!" cleaners on pinterest. Yes baking soda and dawn works to clean your tub, but not nearly as well as the spray and wipe power of modern chemical cleaners (at least in my opinion - it takes a lot more elbow grease to clean the old cast iron clawfoot tub I have compared to the more modern fiberglass tubs and showers most people have) But this is one of the good ones on pinterest - in fact, this is what Oxyclean is. It's technically what is  referred to as oxygen bleach and it's just a mix of washing soda and hydrogen peroxide. (source: wikipedia) 

I haven't made this myself yet, but the recipe is as follows :

Homemade Oxy Clean 
1 cup water 
1/2 cup hydrogen peroxide
1/2 cup washing soda

Mix all ingredients together and store in a dark spray bottle. Hydrogen peroxide loses its effectiveness if stored in a light container. 

To use: Spray on soiled laundry and let it sit overnight. Or, if you have a number of clothes that are soiled, you make up a batch of this and soak them


Has anyone made this? how did it compare to things like Oxyclean?