Cleaning the Burners

I feel like I'm carving a niche out for myself as the "stay-at-home-mom-with-no-children" type. I constantly gravitate towards blogs, planners, organization advice, etc like I've got 3 kids to keep track of. I think I just love the system of a well managed home and having kids usually results in that sort of thing. Who could say.

Anyway, it was become increasingly more imperative that I get the burners and drip pans of my stove cleaned. Every single time I cooked something my smoke alarm would go off! Seriously, I boiled a pot of water and it went berzerker. The burnt-on crustiness was becoming kind of a hazard. I saw this amazing idea on Pinterest that suggested putting the pieces in ziplock bags with a little ammonia and letting it set over night. The fumes clean the schmuck and you don't even have to scrub. I was a believer.

Unfortunately, this one just didn't work for me. It seemed to work well on my burners, but those weren't terrible to begin with. But my drip pans were atrocious and the fumes just didn't have the punch to really get the job done. Perhaps it's because they were more at the burnt-to-shit level than the really-greasy level. I also suspect that my Aldi-brand ziplock bags didn't have the tightest seal. At any rate, I couldn't just leave them (which is generally my inclination if Plan A doesn't work) because I couldn't stand to hear that damn alarm go off another time.

So, because I've had moderate success with this at-home cleaner, I decided to bust it out. Between that cleaner and my magic eraser, I'm pretty satisfied with the results. Not perfect, but I probably won't set the house on fire!

Before and After:


Not bad! Here's the other side, post cleaning:

Don't even ask me about that little guy down there at the bottom. He is just seriously beyond help. What a little asshole. At any rate, they are clean now (mostly.) I won't say that my methods were even close to being "scrub-free" but they do appear to be effective!