DOMESTIC FELICITY

(This afternoons dinner)

Paree and I assembled a baking dishful of ziti for baking. While it was in the oven, I threw myself into the work of scrubbing my stainless steel tea kettle, and tea pot. The tea kettle I have had for years and had quite a build up of grease from sitting on the stovetop day after day. The pot, much younger than the tea kettle, cleaned up in about five minutes.

In all, by the time the baked ziti came out of the oven I was finished with the cleaning and polishing; about thirty minutes. They look so pretty and shiney, and really took minimal elbow grease.

I try to be conscience about the chemical effect on our enviornment and usually use the most natural cleaning products available to me. For the cleaning of my stainless steel kitchen applicances I use baking soda and a lemon, or lime, enviornmentally safe dish soap and a non-abrasive cleaning pad.

I didn´t think about posting this until I was all finished and saw how pretty they looked or I would have taken before pictures, but I will explain how I go about cleaning my stainless steel, let´s take a look at the tea kettle.

First I wet the kettle with hot soapy water, remove it to the other sink or counter, then I sprinkle on the baking soda, take half a lemon or lime, and begin to scrub in a circular motion. I do this over the entire appliance adding more baking soda as needed and squeezing a few drops of the citric juice over it as I go along. I usually do a rinse to see if there are any spots that I missed and if so, work those areas a bit more. Once it looks clean I give it a good scrub in some hot soapy water, then give it a final rinse in warm water and dry it immediately with a soft dishtowel; shiney and beautiful once again.

I never worry about the bottom, because nobody can see it, and it will surely blacken after the first use over the flame of the stove. To me it´s not a big deal.

One thing to be careful of when cleaning stainless steel, is not to use anything too abrasive and to keep your movments going in the same direction, otherwise your surface will look scratched and old.

Dinner was delicious, dishes done, now I´m off to find another occupation to keep me busy for rest of the afternoon...