How to Clean Cookie Sheets

Our big Kitchen remodel is almost done - queue the choir!!  I'll be posting pictures once we get a bunch of the cleanup done, but let me just say I'm beyond thrilled with it!

One of the meals I cooked this week is an old-time favorite of ours - meatloaf and mashed potatoes.  We started using a meatloaf pan some time ago and really like it - the pan above is the bottom part and the top is a similar pan, but with holes in the bottom so that the grease drips through into the bottom pan.  But this time while the meatloaf was cooking I started smelling a rather BURNED smell and come to find out I had a nice, baked on charcoal layer in my bottom pan:

YUCK!  Sad thing is that this picture was taken after I tried several methods to get it clean, including using a spatula to try and chisel it out.

I remembered reading on Jillee's Blog - One Good Thing by Jillee (one of the best blogs ever by the way!) about a foolproof pan cleaning method and by golly it works!  I'm pretty lazy though, so the thought of making a paste and then scrubbing didn't really appeal to me.  What I did was sprinkle baking soda on half the pan (in the interest of comparison I did one side at a time) and then sprayed hydrogen peroxide (in a cute pink sprayer!) on the baking soda until it was good and drenched.

I stuck it down in the sink just in case some kind of volcanic eruption should occur.  Fortunately nothing exciting happened.  

It was at this point that the phone rang and I ended up talking about 5-10 minutes.  I came back in the kitchen and used my spatula and look how clean it is with no scrubbing at all!

This was pretty exciting to me because I had just told Keith I would probably have to throw this pan away - and now it looked like I was wrong!

I repeated the process on the other half of the pan, but this time I used a green scrubby instead of the spatula.  I only let it sit for maybe 5 minutes before scrubbing and it came right off.  Then I tilted the pan and repeated, making sure to get the soda/peroxide mixture down in the corners.  Again, very minimal scrubbing and in the end my pan looked like this: 

I'll bet the scratches are from the spatula scrubbing, so I don't recommend that method, especially since it's really not necessary.  After the baking soda/peroxide cleaning I then used my regular dish soap to clean the pan.

I am so thrilled to have found a simple pan cleaning method!!!  And really I'm not real sure what that says about me that I'm this excited......   ;)

Deep Thoughts: "You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you. - Andy Warhol"

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