Baking Soda

Every time I use baking soda to clean something, I make a mental note to post this little miracle of science on my blog. Have you ever used baking soda as a household cleaner? Today I took my dish drainer apart. It's white. It's ten years old. We live in California. The mineral deposits here are orange. OK? Orange. So every couple of weeks, the resting tray on my dish drainer has an orange hue. It sounds like it could be nice, but it's not nice. It's not nice at all! It's nasty. I took it apart to clean it, right, and there was a box of baking soda just like the one you're looking at right now sitting on the window ledge in front of me. I dumped a bunch of this powerful powder all over the tray and scrubbed it with a green scratch pad. Within a few minutes every stain was gone.

It works to clean all kinds of things. I use it to clean grease spots off my cookie sheets, burn spots off my pots, baked-on spills on my stove top, grass stains off white leather tennis shoes, stains on the tub, and mineral build up around the edges of my sink where the caulk has worn away. Oh yes, and my kids brush their teeth with it every couple of months per their fathers request.

Supposedly it works alongside peroxide to deodorize dogs after a skunk attack, but I did not find this to be true; nor tomato juice, nor tomatoes, nor special skunkbegone shampoo, nor any other miracle cure of any kind. We had to sit that one out, and sit we did. For four weeks of the pungent odor. Stings the nostrils!

Oh yeah, it also works cooking as a leavening agent in baked goods, but you already knew that, huh? Yep. It's an amazing product. And it's $.42 a box. Can't beat it.