The first pieces of writing of the year are always about predictions, resolutions, hot trends, and diets. I'll be honest: writing about what's hip in food for a particular year is usually an unpleasant and forced activity for me. This year, I actually came up with something to say in an organic way. It's not a prediction; it's just something to think about.
Elbow grease.
During the holiday break, I lost all my routines. One morning, I found myself at home with Ursula scrubbing out the inside of our 24-inch rental apartment stove. The mess inside this oven was the kind of thing not even a toxic spray, steel wool and rubber gloves could tackle without breaking a sweat, but we had some energy to burn.
Of course I elected to do it the "natural way," passing up the can of Easy-Off and instead, making a paste of baking soda, vinegar, and dish soap. The kiddo and I slowly mixed the vinegar into the baking soda to prevent a room full of fizzy foam and scrubbed the inside of our oven to music for at least an hour. Traditional oven cleaners take about as long but you don't have to scrub; I think you are meant to watch television while the chemicals eat away the remains of your meals.
Midway though I realized I was getting some kind of sick joy out of this task, fulfilling both the physical and spiritual needs that are usually filled in the mornings at yoga, an activity I was missing from lack of the sitter. We laughed, we sweated, and we also had moments of focus, quiet and peace, almost like a meditation.
I thought about holidays where a copper bowl of whipping cream went around the table, each person taking a few minutes with the whisk until we had whipped cream for our pie, and how once the stand mixer did the job, that was one less thing to do together as a family. Elbow grease.
Sure, the stove-cleaning project took longer than it would have with chemicals, and it's probably less clean. In this era of instant Google-gratification and the ability to create things that are near-perfect (I'm thinking of everything from plastic surgery to iPhone photo apps) taking a while to complete a task, and being able to settle for it being less than "best" is actually a luxury. By scrubbing our ovens and kneading our bread and whipping our cream by hand we can teach ourselves some important lessons.
This year I'm going to pay extra attention to what I do by hand, and how by doing it I can spend more time with someone (including myself), how I break more of a sweat, how I give myself a few extra minutes to zone out and breathe. Elbow grease will be the hot new ingredient in my kitchen.
Some inspiration from our archives on ways to add some elbow grease to your kitchen:
• The How's and Why's of Whisking By Hand
• Stand Mixer vs. Arm Muscle: Do You Mix by Hand?
• The Key To Creaming Butter By Hand
• 6 Ways to Make Ice Cream Without an Ice Cream Machine
• Tips and Recipes for Making Tortillas By Hand
(Images: Shutterstock/PRILL, Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan, and Witigonen via Flickr Creative Commons))
How To Make Perfect Bacon in the Oven
How To Cook Tender, Chewy Wheat Berries on the Stovetop
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Straw Mat from The ...
Must-See Small Cool Homes: Week Two
Beth's Romantic & Retro Residence
While I don't envy your oven-cleaning activities, I find tough cleaning/organizing home projects cathartic. Like a good exercise session, it feels so good when it's done, also. Here's to elbow grease in 2013!
A beautiful, thoughtful post. Although we have a dishwasher, a number of our dishes, pots and glasses aren't dishwasher-safe. So I find myself washing at least some dishes by hand every day. Sometimes, I'll end up taking things from the partially filled dishwasher and washing them in the sink too, for much the same meditative pleasures and sense of accomplishment you describe here.
Admirable indeed! Interesting cleaning recipe too. Hate Easy Off!
Next time knock the grease down with ~GREASED LIGHTNING~ and proceed with your concoction for baked-on brilliance...
You'll still get work out......:-)
I love this physical goal! It goes hand in hand with my decluttering ambitions for the New Year.
I'm a huge advocate of the manual method, *especially* if it can save me one more appliance or unitasker in an already over crowded kitchen. I've also been going the natural cleansers route for a while.
I don't want to be critical, because this is a lovely post, but you shot yourself in the foot a little on the oven project, I believe. Mixing an acid and a base results in water and a salt, which means by the time the fizzing stopped, you were cleaning with dishsoap and water. You could have gone with dishsoap and vinegar, as the initial solvent that broke down the grease, then when you needed an abrasive made paste of baking soda and water, which would be an abrasive to get the hard gunk off. Or vice-a-versa, or anything but pre-mixing the vinegar and water. The fizzing is fun, but it serves no cleansing purpose.
However, yes!, to manual methods, slow food, and the natural way of doing things! Thank you.
correction: "premixing the vinegar and *baking soda*" not water.
@samtresler
I'm aware of that piece of science but I find that if you stir the vinegar in gradually, it makes a paste that is stable - thus the photo of my nasty stove caked with dried white goop. Seems to work. Don't ask me how! I'm just a humble cook...
I find it a lot easier to clean an oven with the door removed. Just lay the removed door on several layers of old towels to clean. Beats leaning over the open oven door.
Overnight temps and longlasting inversion find me waiting for kitchen pipes to thaw!! A hairdryer is propped and blowing HOT air onto the pipes, and I know that patience will WIN...
Tonight the undersink doors stay OPEN, with space heater positioned and ON. Pipes in crawl space are already wrapped with insul tape, however, below ground level, inside 'extended bump-out' where it's COLDer than COLD.
Thanks for your wonderful posts- love them, and have used many! Elbow grease yet another GREAT addition to my collection!
I love your post! And per your last photo, making homemade bread has always been a cathartic labor of love for me. If you can relax and get out your stress while kneading bread dough, you just can't at all! Although everyone in my house agrees, we all gain about 5 lbs everytime bread starts being made. There's just something about that warm yeasty goodness coming right out of the oven, with some real butter. At least we are all gaining together!
Love the elbow grease idea, especially passing a bowl of cream around allowing everyone to mix it.
When I was very young, my friend and I drew on the sidewalk with crayon. Her mom, who was German, had us scrub it off and gave us Comet and rags. I remember telling her we weren't getting it up. She told us to "use more elbow grease" and for years I always associated Comet and elbow grease. I don't think it was until I was in high school that I finally realized that "elbow grease" was a figure of speech.
Love this post! I too spent a morning cleaning my oven over the holidays and had the most luck with using my pastry scraper to get the gunk off the oven door. It was a victorious moment when I could finally see what was baking inside ;-). I was quite proud of myself and it made all my holiday baking so much more fun.
There's something very satisfying about scrubbing out my bathtub with a similar paste. I also spent a long time whisking homemade mayo last week, so I experienced the same satisfaction and meditation through that (along with a sore forearm).
I don't know if elbow grease is all that you say. There is something to be said for "labor saving devices" and chemicals. I like to wrap grills and such in newspapers, put them in a lawn and leaf trash bag with a cup of ammonia, and let chemistry do the work.
My dear wife OTOH has a penchant for pumice, emery paper, and elbow grease. Ruins anything shiny. But it's clean!
I wonder how healthy and strong we might be if everything weren't quite so convenient.
I cleaned my dishwasher with vinegar baking soda combo.. Removing the floor mesh and all the gunk below, took about an hour on a snowy midwest, and got me warm n toasty from all the exercise!! Refrigerator is calling next...
Wait a second- that lead photo is a sink! I was for a moment really freaked out that your sink was that filthy. Thankfully, it was only your oven :)
Truth be told I am dying to get a Kitchenaid stand mixer but at the same time I want to knead my breads on my own. I find there is nothing as relaxing and reward as making bread, even when the bread doesn't come out exactly the way I want it to.
Love, love, love this post! So funny as I have also had a chance to put a little "elbow grease" into a few home projects this past week...and I feel a great sense of satisfaction from it. Nothing quite gives you the same sense of satisfaction as cleaning and organizing! It also got me to move a bit more (as I'm usually chained to my desk)...so there is the added benefit of exercise! That is one of my New Years resolutions...to "move" more.
Elbow grease has always been the best 'product' since the beginning of time.
Love this post, SK!
While I love the sentiment, I'm still gonna use the self cleaning feature on my oven. :)
Love the post, agree with the principle--I'm always taking crap from people who accuse me of "doing things the hard way"--BUT, compromise creeps in. My bread machine is whirring as I type, because my steel & plastic shoulder faints at the thought of kneading bread anymore. Sometimes you just have to suck it up.
@Sara,
I have to agree with samtresler on the whole mixing of vinegar and baking soda. The paste that you are making is really just a water and baking soda paste. Which you might want to do the next time and not add the vinegar. Baking soda is wonderful for soften and tenderizing protein which is why it's great for scrubbing pots and pans as well as clean ovens. I approach oven cleaning in two stages. First, degrease with a good soap like Dawn. Once the soap has been wiped off with a hot wet sponge, make the baking soda paste with water and smear it on. Leave it for a few hours then use that elbow grease to get all the scrub off.
Greatest Kitchn post ever. I'm lucky that I grew up cleaning horse stalls. There is nothing like getting up early, cleaning out a stall, hauling hay and grain then seeing a newly brushed, fed horse reap the rewards of your hard work. So gratifying.
Kudos for avoiding the toxins too. I tend to splatter cleaning fluids everywhere and it's better knowing it is not harsh chemicals I'm getting all over the floor where our pets walk.
Love this post. My cleaning is usually quick and not very deep, simply because of time. I'm amazed every time I do a deep scrub how cathartic it is. I also love the quiet contemplativeness of labor-intensive activities like baking bread or making soup from scratch. The effort is peaceful instead of frantic.
I'm not a big fan of elbow grease, mainly because I'm dealing with fibromyalgia, but I'm a big fan of sticking with a job until it's done right.
Yes! Elbow grease. I recently watched BBC's "Victorian Kitchen" (an oldie, on YouTube) and the sheer amount of physical labor that went into everyday food (albeit for wealthy people) is astonishing. Ditto "Tudor Feast," with my favorite food historian Ruth Goodman, who enlightened me to the fact that in 16th century England, men did the high-status cooking and women did all the physical labor in the kitchens of the nobility. Who knew?
All I know is, when I feel the burn from whipping cream or using my Danish dough whisk instead of an electric mixer to make things, or when I knead bread, or scrub my pots with the gentle scrubbers and a little Bon Ami instead of the more abrasive (but destructive) steel wool, I feel accomplished.
Plus, not using the electric mixer saves on dishes, which technically saves energy (I have no automatic dishwasher) in the future? I like to tell myself that, anyway...
oh sara.... love this post. and will carry this awareness, of what i choose to do by hand, into my year. thank you!
I definitely need to apply some elbow grease to our whole house! I guess that's what Spring Cleaning is for =)
Anyone hankerng to use some elbow grease is welcome to come on a my house!! Plenty to do, I promise.
Whenever I am upset, trying to figure out a problem, etc., I always turn to cleaning as a way to work my way through the issue. When I found out my stepfather died, I came home a furiously cleaned as a way of mourning. I do that same thing with many gardening chores; I weed when I am trying to work through a problem.
bah, HUMBUG