My first pin

Honestly, I've stopped going on Pinterest. It makes me feel inadequate. Given the time, I'm pretty sure Pinterest could help me make everything in my life magazine-perfect, from my hair to my house, but I was spending too much time pinning and not enough time DOING. And I was developing a complex. All these great ideas, sooo many great ideas, and truthfully I have never brought even one of my pins to fruition.

[pause for dramatics] 

UNTIL NOW.

The lucky winner of my time was this pin. It promised me like-new, clean cookie sheets after years of abuse. You KNOW you have one that looks like this:

Or worse. I do, in fact, have worse but this is my favorite, half-sheet Sur la Table pan that I use every day so I decided to start here. In my case, this is night after night of cooking Ashton's chicken fingers, tater tots, and fish sticks and never properly cleaning it because there is simply too much other stuff that ALSO needs cleaning. Including but not limited to: the floors, the walls, the counters, the sink, the dishes, the highchair and Ashton himself. But I digress.

The pin is really simple. Put about 1/4 cup baking soda into a small bowl and add just enough hydrogen peroxide to make a paste. I smeared it on and, maybe a little too eagerly, immediately started scrubbing.

Hmmm. Let's just say I was afraid this post was going to be more like a before and...well, before. The pan was laughing at me. I double-checked the original website off of Pinterest- she had tested this method on a flat cookie sheet and specifically noted corners and grooves are the toughest. And of course, mine had grooves - 66 to be exact.

So I mixed more paste and let it sit for a few minutes...voila! You know those little wooden BBQ skewers? They are my all purpose cleaning tool for hard to reach spots and I scraped all 66 grooves out, plus the middle circle.

Welllll...

More or less my sentiments. A bit better but not the "MIRACLE" the pin had promised me. After pouring 30 whole minutes of my evening into this, I had had enough, so maybe it's my fault. I might try it with one of my flat pans. Maybe like a year from now. Last time I checked, Pinterest was not calling to photograph my cookie sheets so really, who cares. But I feel slightly productive having pinned something and then actually done it. That's the moral here.

The star of the show will be back in my next post. 21 months tomorrow!

p.s. this post is dedicated to my mom. Now she knows how poorly I have taken care of the pan she got me :-/