Don't Yell Challah in a Crowded Matzah Bakery!

Don’t Yell Challah in a Crowded Matzah Bakery!

The Cleaning Process

Helpful Cleaning Tips

Make sure that before you begin, you have adequate cleaning supplies. This should include:

A bunch of seemingly identical spray bottles of varying toxicity

A vacuum cleaner

A broom, for when the vacuum cleaner stops working

A second broom, to push the first one out of the vacuum cleaner hose

A big bottle of club soda

A big bottle of Advil

Elbow grease (any)

Forty-seven rolls of contact paper with the goose design

If you have no cleaning sprays, you can use lemon juice. Lemon juice cleans almost anything. You almost never see a dirty lemon. In fact, you can even use a lemon to clean off a bar of soap.

You can clean out your toaster with a standard fork, and you can get into those tiny electrical outlets with a paper clip.

Do not forget to clean underneath your couch cushions, because the cleaners will just keep whatever they find. Items you may find in there include: library books, magazine subscription cards, enough change to pay for the dry-cleaning on a couch, the little brush piece that came with your vacuum cleaner that you never quite figured out what to do with, the remote to your air conditioner, a mismatched sock, the pen from the phone drawer, enough crumbs to feed a hungry child in Africa, a dead banana, and that hamster that your daughter used to have.

You can pry the computer keys off your keyboard with a flat-head screwdriver.

You can find them under the furniture with a standard flashlight.

Also, do not forget to sweep off the outside of your vacuum cleaner, and to vacuum the dirt off the bottom of the broom. Which of these you should do last I do not know.

Cleaning the Kitchen

Another big and complicated aspect of kitchens is the kashering process. Kashering is the process by which you make your pots and ovens and George Foreman grills fit to be used on Pesach, even though you use them for chametz all year long, and everything tastes like that time you burnt the gefilte fish. Kashering basically works by heating up the utensil with no food inside, so that instead of absorbing the taste of, say, the kugel, it absorbs the taste of nothing, or, if you heat it for too long, burnt nothing.

There are various methods of kashering, based on how you normally use the utensil in question. Items that are normally heated directly, such as ovens, grills, Bunsen burners, those little travel ranges that heat up when you plug them in, and sandwich makers, are all kasheredby letting them heat up to the point where you could basically light your chametz off of them, although Hashem alone knows why you want to kasher your sandwich maker. If these objects do not become hot enough on their own, a popular option is to use a flamethrower, because in what other scenario would a middle-aged housewife get to use a flamethrower? Of course, in the old days, they had to kasher their pots with two sticks or a magnifying glass. But they did have way more time on their hands, because it took them only one night to clean their homes.

As far as items that are normally used with foods, such as pots, pans, silver cups, silverware, flatware, trays, serving utensils, teakettles, and the kitchen sink, they all have to be kashered through immersion in boiling water. (And if you cannot for the life of you figure out how to immerse your kitchen sink in boiling water, we will tell you that the process involves a tea kettle, and hopefully, your rabbi.)

THE TABLE:

THE CABINETS:

THE REFRIGERATOR:

The next step is to take the entire fridge apart, piece by piece, using power tools if necessary, while taking care to remember which piece is which because refrigerators are expensive. Wash all the pieces, rinse, and repeat. If you are able to put the whole fridge back together and it still smells like feet, you can leave an open box of baking soda in there to absorb the odors. Baking soda is very good at absorbing odors, which is why they put it in toothpaste. Just make sure never to use that baking soda for cooking, but to use an entirely different box that you keep sealed, preferably in a separate house that no one lives in.

THE SINK:

If you have the kind of sink that needs contact paper, make sure it is the type of contact paper that will remain sticky even after you use the sink.

THE DISHWASHER:

THE OVEN:

THE STOVE:

Offices, Cubicles, Etc.

http://www.israelbookshoppublications.com/store/pc/Don-t-Yell-Challah-in-a-Crowded-Matzah-Bakery-11p116.htm