How to Clean the Fridge and Stove the Green Way

Posted by admin on July 30th, 2007 at 09:28pm

Attack that yucky junk stuck in your refrigerator and on your stove top without attacking the environment.

The potatoes boil over. The juice spills. Life gets busy and you forget to clean up on the spot. A week later, you realize that there is yucky junk baked all around the stove top burners or congealed on the refrigerator shelves. TV would tell you to get out an aerosol can or a bottle of corrosive chemicals.

Don’t do it!

Instead, reach for the salt.

The Green Refrigerator
One of the worst things we get stuck in our own refrigerator is maple syrup. No matter how careful we are, little drops of it run down the bottle, eventually forming an almost rock-hard pool. The following remedy will work for puddles of dried juice, salad dressing, liquid vitamins, or just about any substance that spills and hardens.

Shake a good little pile of salt onto the puddle. Let it sit for 5 minutes. Soak your sponge or scrubbie in very hot water, and use elbow grease to start scrubbing the puddle away. As you will see, the salt ‘magically’ begins to absorb and break up the puddle so that it can be sloughed off easily.

Plain old salt also really gets the bottoms of your vegetable drawers spotless using this same easy, green procedure.

Bad smelling refrigerator? Provided it’s not something going on with the mechanics of your appliance, stale smells in the fridge can easily be absorbed with the following trick:

Cut an orange in half. Scrape out the pulp. Fill the orange half with a couple of tablespoons of salt. Set in the refrigerator. Within a few days, the refrigerator should smell much better inside.

The Green Stove
In general, the stove burners can be harder to clean than refrigerator messes. However, try the same salt soak process described above. If this doesn’t work, try doing the same thing but using baking soda instead of salt. Be sure to use Bob’s Red Mill baking soda - not Arm & Hammer. Arm & Hammer tests on animals. Read more about this subject.

If all else fails, think back to your childhood, when you found it so funny to pour vinegar into baking soda. Put baking soda in the burner trough. Drizzle with vinegar (white, red, apple cider, balsamic, or any kind will do). When it foams up, get scrubbing. We’ve yet to meet an unhappy burner that didn’t respond with joy to this zippy treatment.

Why green cleaning is better
The majority of common, popular household cleaning products marketed to Americans contain seriously dangerous chemicals and toxins. You don’t want to breathe this stuff, pour it into the water supply, or have it anywhere around cooking and food storage surfaces. In other words, you do not want substances like:

• Bleach
• Ammonia
• Petroleum products
• Formaldehyde
• Perfumes

…in your mouth!

Our pioneer ancestors prided themselves on keeping spotlessly clean houses, and they did it all with natural products. You can, too. It’s easier, cheaper, and safer for you and your planet.

Under Green Housekeeping