The Blue Paste

I wanted to take a break from posting food this week to talk about something else just as important: cleaning! With the amount of cooking that happens, even if just 1-2 days a week, the kitchen sure gets pretty grimy. 

This is probably worse than normal from a batch cooking last December, but on any given week, our stove resembles this grease-splattered mess at least once. Stove messes are a catalyst for other messes because anything left on the stove will transfer to the bottom of my pans the next time I cook without wiping it down. 

I recently saw a cleaning paste made with three ingredients which I already had at home: hydrogen peroxide, dish soap, and baking soda. The recipe is written in a 2:1:1 ratio so I used:

1/2 cup hydrogen peroxide

1/4 cup dish soap

1/4 cup baking soda

Our dish soap is the blue Dawn dish soap, but if you wanted an all-natural alternative, I'm sure it could work just as well. 

This paste is my go-to for everything non-porous now. I use it on our stove top. I use it to clean our kitchen sink. I've even cleaned bathroom sinks with it. I should try cleaning the shower with it, too, but I haven't gotten that far. I love baking soda as a natural no-scratch abrasive. Our stove looks brand new after I use this cleaner on it.

There was a house for sale on our street a few years ago, and we went to the open house. Her stove was pristine. I want our stove to look like that whenever the time comes for us to move (or die). 

Our kitchen sink is another super gross spot which needs a deep clean about once every 1-2 months. I try my best to always rinse the food into the strainer so it doesn't sit in parts of the sink, but alas, the sink always manages to get dirty. This cleaning solution has made it much faster and easier than ever to clean my sink and the wire grate.

Would you believe me if I said it took less than 10 minutes to clean my sink?

Do you know what tool I like best to clean the sink with? A bottle brush! It's the only tool that's both flexible and strong enough to clean between all those little grates in my wire stand. I love having one of these so my dishes don't have to sit on the bottom of the sink with all the food gunk, but cleaning it sure can be a hassle. You'll still find me in the baby aisle at Walmart to buy the occasional bottle brush replacement....to clean my kitchen sink! 

If you're ever at our house and you see a jar of blue stuff sitting on the ledge above our sink with a pair of disposable chopsticks lying across the lid, that's the magical jar of paste that cleans all my non-porous surfaces and restores them to like-new. 😄