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.