Celebrating our first coffee pot volcano.

A few days ago I was watching this hilarious reality show on BBC America called “How Clean Is Your House,” where two middle-aged British women in lab coats clean up the dirtiest homes on the planet. On last week’s show Kim and Aggie were helping a retired NYC fireman sanitize his hovel so his 14-year-old daughter could spend the summer with him and not throw up from embarrassment. For instance, he’d been sleeping on a plastic-covered love seat in the upstairs hall for the last two years because his bedroom was so overrun with trash, food and dirty laundry that he couldn’t find the bed. And there was mold growing in his kitchen cookware and E.coli bacteria on the countertops. (I can’t find adequate words to describe the condition of his bathroom.)

If you wonder why I’m telling you this, it’s because halfway into the show I learned a terrific household hint! Aggie’s tip for cleaning seriously stained cookware (or cookware with burned-on food) is EFFERDENT TABLETS in warm water ... so I decided to try this on our stainless steel coffee carafe, which was so discolored it almost looked black inside. (The last time I cleaned this thing I used a stiff brush and a whole 16 oz. bottle of Soft Scrub. It took TWO HOURS.) I immediately sent Sam to Wal-Mart for a box of Efferdent.

So we pop in a couple of tablets, fill the carafe with warm water and wait 15 minutes. There’s a little bubbly stuff going on, but basically it doesn’t do much of anything and the stain doesn’t budge. That’s when Sam figures maybe we’re supposed to use MORE than two, which makes pretty good sense, so we throw in 24 tablets and (eureka!) wind up with a third-grade Mount St. Helens science project spewing endless foam all over the sink while thousands of hysterical citizens run for cover. (I’m just kidding about that last part.) The result? Our carafe is stain-free, sparkling clean and minty fresh. It just doesn’t get much better than this!

In other news, Sam and I enjoyed a nice little drive on Sunday out to Ham’s Orchards in Terrell for a bunch of fresh peaches. Unfortunately, their first crop is a few days late so we browsed around in the produce market and wound up with a gigantic seedless watermelon and a jar of homemade “Texas Caviar” instead. For those of you unfamiliar with the latter, this is basically a spicy relish made with black-eyed peas.

Maybe we’ll try again for peaches next weekend. Thank you for reading this.