Exceedingly Mundane

tidbits of random nothingness

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Jul
28
Posted by Stace

Boos Board

Tuesday afternoon, since Hambones was down, I tried to get a few odds and ends done. I was catching up on some stuff on the DVR and was watching an episode of Rachael Ray. She said, as she has said before, that the best way to clean a wooden cutting board is with fresh lemon juice and kosher salt. So, I decided there was no time like the present.

I squeezed a whole lemon, one half at a time, and then spread sea salt on one side of my Boos board. It made a bit of a mess, but it seemed to do a pretty good job of cleaning and deoderizing it. I need to do the other side soon. I let it dry good and then wiped it down well with board oil. I’ve done the oil several times before, but had never cleaned it with lemon and salt.

I should have blogged about my board before. I have a set of plastic color-coded cutting boards that I use (actually, it’s my second set, I wore the first one out), and also a smaller wooden cutting board that I like. But for a while now, I had been wanting a nice board. All of the cooking shows that I watch, they seem to all use the Boos brand of cutting board. So, since Tim is always wonderful to me, he surprised me this past Christmas with one. I love the thing, I know it was a splurge but I plan to use it for a very long time to come. And after all, he had given me my Wusthof santoku knife for my birthday last October, so getting the board for Christmas seemed rather logical 🙂

Mar
25
Posted by Stace

Cleaning, Part 1 – The Kitchen

I always have such good intentions about blogging. Take this blog post, for instance. I took this picture over a month ago, and stored it away to write a post about:

Now, here it is several weeks later, and I no longer have any of the dish soap or hand soap. I was going to blog about how I had bought my first Mrs. Meyer’s products last fall and winter. I love this pine scent that came out around the holidays. I was going to blab about how my local Target had this one seasonal scent, but I can no longer find these products at my store. And of course, they’re not at Walmart (where I normally shop, I know, I know!). I don’t shop at drugstore type stores (CVS, Walgreens, etc), so I don’t know if they carry them. I was pleasantly surprised to find some unscented Mrs. Meyer’s products at my local Marshalls / TJ Maxx stores. That’s where I got the countertop spray in the middle, which I do still have 🙂

I had the best intentions about doing a nice, little post about cleaning products, and what people use to clean their kitchen with. Are you a germophobe and very concerned about germs, and only use anti-bacterial products? Do you hand wash dishes, and if so, what brand or type of dish soap do you use? Are you adamant about your floors and countertops, and what do you use on them? Are you a sucker for a certain kind of dishwasher product – tabs, gel, powder, etc?

I must admit, I’m brand dependent, but only to the extent of what I can find in bulk at our local Sam’s Club, combined with what I like. I normally use Palmolive anti-bacterial dish soap. It’s an orange colored liquid that I buy in a huge container at Sams, then I fill up a glass olive oil with spout type container at home (did that make ANY sense?!) to use for washing pots and pans in the sink. I use Cascade tabs in my dishwasher. I’ve tried powder, gel and tabs, and I do like the ease and convenience of the tabs. Sam’s sells both Electrosol brand and Cascade brand, but I couldn’t tell a huge difference between them. The Cascade are a bit cheaper, so that’s what we use. I keep hand soap on my sink, but once I had used up all of my Mrs Meyers, I admit I went back to using the Equate brand from Walmart, an antibacterial one. I mop my floors with Armstrong floor cleaner. With a dog that is only allowed on the tile in the kitchen, my floors have to be cleaned pretty often 🙂

So, there, it’s not timely or well-stated, but I wanted to ramble on about cleaning products in the kitchen. I’m always interested in what other people use, and what they like and dislike. It’s usually a good way to find something new to try, that I might like better 🙂 I am a homebody and I work hard to keep our home a happy, healthy, clean, comfortable place. These topics are so mundane to most, but always so intriguing to me!

Leave me a comment and let me know what you use at your house, or if you really could care less about this type of stuff 🙂 Maybe you’re not the only cleaning up the kitchen, or maybe it just doesn’t matter. But if it does, and you’ve found products that you either like or dislike for whatever reason, let me know!

Oh, and have a great day!

Feb
16
Posted by Stace

Yin and Yang

Every week, I empty the kitchen and breakfast room of all the chairs around the table, and sweep and mop the floors really well. Beau, for some unknown reason, loves, loves, loves to lay up under the table when all of the chairs are gone. He actually grumps and growls at me when I start to move them back and he has to move out 🙂 I have never actually seen him do this before, though, and he laid like that for a long time, propped up against the leg of the table. I’m really surprised he did, that table leg is pretty hard and probably not very comfy!

P.S. Tim said this looked like a yin and yang photo of him, with the sun and shadow on his face. I love photos of him like that! Aw heck, who am I kidding, I love all photos of my Beau-Beau 😀

Feb
10
Posted by Stace

Washing Dishes is Fun Again & a QOTD

Or at least, washing dishes is fun for a few days, LOL!

The sprayer on my kitchen sink broke in early December, and I told Tim we should just wait till after Christmas to replace it. That led to early February, but it all worked out really well for me. We looked at Lowe’s and didn’t see just a replacement sprayer (although Tim told me later he did find one), so we decided to get a whole new faucet set. My sink and faucet are original to the house, so they are over 15 years old. One of us said something to the effect of “it sure would be a shame to put a nice, shiny new faucet on that old, scratched up, rusted sink”. I can’t remember who said that at the moment 😀 Anyway, I picked out a new sink too. I really like being able to pick out fixtures and lighting and stuff to replace what we have here. Everything put in by the builder was the lowest level possible, so now I have a nicer sink, two inches deeper, and a nicer faucet that doesn’t leak, with a sprayer that works. Ah, washing dishes is fun again!

Here’s the old one:

And the nice shiny new one:

So, that leads to an unusual Question of the Day: Do you have a good cleaner for stainless steel? Or any tricks to keeping my new sink as clean and shiny and protected for as long as possible? I have always used BarKeeper’s Friend (a powder, sort of like Comet) or SoftScrub on my sink, but I’m wondering if I should be using something else. Something for stainless or something special for sinks. It sure has a lot of water spots all the time!

Leave me a comment and let me know if you have any tips or suggestions on keeping a stainless steel sink clean. And have a great day!