Are you guys addicted to Pinterest yet? There’s a lot of that going around lately. So many great ideas! So little chance I will implement ANY of them! A few weeks ago I saw an idea I did decide I should try, however. It was a post proclaiming the wonders of baking soda and hydrogen peroxide to make old cookie sheets look like newish. My own cookie sheets have definitely seen shinier days, so I mixed up a paste of baking soda and peroxide and tried to go to town. And it… sort of worked. If I really cared more about the state of my cookie sheets, I probably could have scrubbed and scrubbed with that concoction and maybe eradicated at least the most recent few years of ugly, baked-on crud. But you know what? I don’t. I’ve used my cookie sheets, so they look used. And I’m OK with that.

My glass baking pan, however? That one I haven’t given up on. And yet, I foolishly used that pan to broil a piece of salmon the other night rather than using the black metal roasting pan that’s actually designed for such a thing. And hence, I ended up with some burned-on stains on the bottom of the pan that weren’t coming off with plain dish soap and a scrubber sponge. So I tried the baking soda and peroxide mixture in there, and you know what? That actually worked! Hurrah. Ditto on my black nylon spatula and spaghetti server, both of which have had a weird white residue on them (Hard water stains? Dishwasher detergent? No idea…) for years now. A little scrubbing with the soda/peroxide paste, and that residue’s all but vanished. Magic!

I was trying to remember why I bought the bottle of peroxide I have stashed under my sink in the first place, so I did a quick search of The Greenists archives and remembered. It was this post, written by Courtney a year and a half ago already. Have I tried a single one of those five unusual uses for hydrogen peroxide since I first read them? Apparently not. But I will now! Maybe I’ll even pin them to a Pinterest board to be extra sure I don’t forget. Maybe you should, too!