10-Minute Restoration

Even though I'm 32 years old, I'm a big fan of some tried-and-true basics when I need a quick lunch fix. Macaroni and Cheese (Kraft, mind you. Never the off-brand), Spaghetti O's with meatballs (ditto on the name brand), and Campbell's Chunky Soup often find themselves in front of me on my lunch break, often augmented with a pickle, some fruit, or a handful of Tapatio Doritos.  That's good stuff, man, and fifty years from now I'll probably be requesting Spaghetti O's with meatballs when I've got a couple of marbles rolling around upstairs and the nursing home staff has long since given up on trying to get me to eat healthy.  I always make my Macaroni and Cheese in the same pot, too, but last week my wife discovered a bit of a problem when she went to get something in the kitchen:

The horror!  I left the stove on, and all the extra milk and cheesey goodness had been burnt and, I thought, permanently bonded to the pot.  Say it ain't so!  But for a while, it was.  I tried scraping it, washing it, and boiling it while hoping in vain that something would work.  Try as I might, victory escaped my grasp and taunted me each time...until this morning.  As I was staring at the pot wondering how I could resurrect it to its once-storied status I remembered the little bottle of Brasso we had in the cupboard.

For those of you who have never heard of Brasso, it's basically magic in squeezable form. It can clean almost anything, and I can't believe it took me a whole week to think about using it on the pan.  It's kind of like industrial-strength Soft Scrub in that it uses a slurry of microscopic particles and cleaning solvent to remove the dirt from a given surface.  A few minutes into the cleaning process my hands were getting tired but I was seeing some promising results:

3 minutes of scrubbing and all's well thus far.

Lookin' good so far!

I used an old T-shirt that I had in my rag pile out in the garage to do the actual scrubbing, and things went a little smoother when I started going in a circular motion instead of back and forth.  All in all the process took about 10 minutes, and I was left with a pot in mint condition:

Now time to go grab some Spaghetti O's and get my lunch on...