cheap and effective kitchen must-haves

so with it being a holiday weekend and all, i’m not sure i’ll get to cooking much over the next few days but i like to have a blog 2-3 times a week, so i thought maybe i’d talk about two of my favourite kitchen cleaning items.

what got me on this kick was how just now – i was stumbling around on pinterest, my favourite social networking site – and found this article with 75 reasons baking soda can be used.  i love this kind of stuff.  i love alternatives to conventional items like the chemically-drenched products we see lining the shelves everywhere.  i think i really got on this kick when our dishwasher broke down this winter… i tried every kind of “natural” dish detergent out there and nothing seemed to work – until we realized it was broken haha!  but the point is, we thought it was the detergent so we went back to a conventional brand loaded with chemicals and i just haven’t felt good about it since.  the dishwasher works just fine now, but i SO don’t want that stuff cleaning my dishes that i put organic and wonderful food on top of.  haha – snob alert!!

i try to keep things as simple as possible.  i aspire to be like nature – it is so perfect.  we can heal ourselves with food and we can keep our lives healthy and clean with tools found in nature. baking soda is a perfect example.

did you know – baking soda can do all this :

– can be used as an antacid

– add to bathwater to soften skin and relieve irritations

– helps relieves bee stings or jellyfish bites

– add to vaporizer to help stuffy nose

– sprinkle in ash tray to reduce odor and prevent smoldering

– suck it up with your vacuum to remove odors

– wash fruits and veggies with it

– soak dried beans in it to make more digestable

– removes grease from pans

– scrub stainless steel with it

– mix with a teaspoon of hydrogen peroxide and use as toothpaste (i do!)

– clean the fridge with it

– run your coffee maker with a baking solution, then rinse

and the list goes on and on!

another favourite and cost-effective tool of mine that i like to use around the home is vinegar.  just regular ol’ white distilled vinegar does the trick.  you can pretty much clean your entire home with a vinegar solution, so long as you don’t mind the scent at first.  i’m still trying to convince my roommate, but i just clean with it and don’t tell him 🙂  for more information on vinegar cleaning, check out this website i found.

think of all the chemicals we will be avoiding and omitting from our daily lives if we used what was naturally occurring, more readily available, and therefore better for the environment.  think of the money we would save.  think of the sense of peace you’ll have knowing your family’s home and food is clean and safe.  and think of how {quietly and lovingly} we can know deep down that we are making the healthiest and most economic choices in our homes and lives. 🙂

i’m not trying to tell you what to do. i’m just trying to make us all think differently.

i have a really exciting blog to post this week too, about nature’s medicine – and just how unbelievably perfect it truly is.  there are no accidents in nature.  no coincidences.  and we are certainly not separate from it.  in fact, we need it more than we realize and i feel that is starting to become more evident in today’s world.

i also plan to make *some* kind of nice meal on sunday.  i kind of broke up with holidays when i broke up with facebook, but i still like to enjoy the food.  i’m thinking of finishing using up my black forest bacon and making some kind of brunch for dinner 🙂  we’ll see, i still have a little time to plan the menu.

all i do is think about food.  seriously.  my roommate literally said to me verbatim the other night,   “i like how you’re always concerned about the food.” haha!

Tags: cleaning, ingredients, kitchen