Cleaning in Between

Well, since I seem to be on an oven-cleaning frenzy, here's another strange, but kinda cool cleaning tip:

I somehow ended up with some schmutz in between the panes of glass on my oven door. I have no clue how it got there, and worse yet, no clue how to clean it. I spent over an hour trying to take apart my oven door one afternoon, and after removing screws, gently prying, prodding, and even swearing, I came to the conclusion that it was a job best left to the professionals. It just seemed so silly to me to pay someone to come to my house just to clean the inside of the oven door. I mean really, how hard could it be??? Well, since I seem to be spending loads of time on the computer anyway, I did a quick search on the topic, and much to my surprise, I found the answer. There is a deep, dark, little secret on how to clean in between those panes of glass that I'm going to share with you...

OK, first step is to remove the drawer on the bottom of the oven. Now, if you're like me, you'll find many dust bunnies, crumbs, and maybe even some long-lost treasures down there when you do. I took the opportunity to clean under there, after yelling "EEEEWWWWWW!!!!!", of course.

Once the drawer has been removed, look at the underside of the bottom edge of your oven door. This may require lying on the floor, or perhaps a little bit of contortionism. Or you know, just feel it with your hands. There should be a couple large holes along the bottom edge of the door.

Get something with a longish handle (I used a big wooden spoon) and cover it with a cloth, such as a towel or a sock. Secure with a rubber band, and spray the cloth lightly with glass cleaner.

Now here's where the genius part comes in: shove the sock-covered-spoon in one of those holes on the bottom of the oven door, and wipe away all the gooey stuff that is between the panes of glass. Brilliant, right???

Cleaning with Dryer Sheets

It happens every year, right about this time..... the oven needs cleaning. After all the baking and roasting on Thanksgiving, my oven is usually blackened with grease, burned crumbs, and spills galore. Now, I'm lucky enough that my oven has a "self cleaning" cycle that can handle all the gunky splatters from roasting our huge turkey, but there is one thing that often get overlooked (or never cleaned at all in my case), and that is the oven racks. They can't go through the cleaning cycle, and I'm not exactly diligent about keeping them spotless. OK, I've never cleaned them since we moved in 4 years ago, I confess. They were GROSS! Quite understandable after being used and abused for years without cleaning, I suppose.


Now, I know my cleaning methods are not exactly the norm, but this one will seem especially strange, I'm sure. I got the wild idea (thank you again Pinterest) to scrub my oven racks clean with dryer sheets. Do you understand what I mean by "strange" now? Let me explain... I saw a silly little post on Pinterest.com where someone had cleaned their muffin pan with a dryer sheet. My muffin pan just happened to be a bit sad looking from lots of baking, so I tried it out just to see if it actually worked. Surprisingly, it worked great and my muffin pan now looks like new. So, of course, when I saw that my oven racks were disgustingly blackened, I started eyeing my box of dryer sheets.

Now, oven racks are too big for me to put in the kitchen sink to soak and scrub, so I started out by tossing them in the bathtub to soak with about 15 or 20 dryer sheets.

See, I told you they were gross.

After letting them soak for a few hours (not sure how many, because I forgot about them), I rolled up my sleeves and scrubbed them with the same dryer sheets they had been soaking with. After a short while, my oven racks looked like this:

Do you still think I'm crazy for cleaning with dryer sheets??? I didn't think so.