Oil stains on blue polo shirts

We've had an ongoing problem for a while now. Once anything slightly greasy touches one of my husband's dark blue polo shirts, the dark stain remains there forever. This kind of stain has stumped me for quite some time now. I finally looked up some advice online and asked around at work. After quite some work, and a $6 investment in some products, I think we've figured it out!!! 4 shirts have now been salvaged from the realms of "just wear it at home", including a dress shirt where a fish oil capsule burst.

First, I made a paste out of some Oxiclean powder and scrubbed that into all the pesky little spots on a T-shirt that a sausage blew up on. Then I dumped it in the washer on hot with our regular detergent and a scoop of Oxiclean. I threw in the 2 other shirts with similar (but fewer) stains. These stains never show up on damp shirts, so we were going to throw them in to the next load of whites (hot) with Oxiclean again. But first...

Hubby had heard that dawn was really good at grease removal. I had seen the commercial where they were cleaning an oil-slicked duck with dawn, too. So I took the dress shirt with the fish oil capsule stain, wet it under the hottest water I could stand, put on about a teaspoon of dawn, and scrubbed it between my hands really hard, occasionally rinsing it with really hot water again. I completely rinsed it out and did that again. Then I added it to the hot load of whites and oxiclean and detergent that also included the one shirt scrubbed with oxiclean paste, and two that were not.

We hung all 4 special shirts to air dry and waited. The two polo shirts with the least serious stains now show no evidence of oil stains! The dress shirt with fish oil had a faded stain, and the oxiclean paste polo shirt with the most and worst stains had faded stains. We're getting somewhere!!

I do the dawn and hand scrub thing to the fish oil dress shirt one more time and throw it and the worst polo shirt in with a different load of hot whites with detergent and oxiclean. This time, the dress shirt came out stain free!!

The worst polo shirt still had some spots, and later got added to a load with a white fuzzy bath mat which I do not recommend! I knew I would have to re-wash it to get off the bathmat fuzz, but this morning I noticed that it still shows 2 or 3 spots of oil. Seeing how there were originally about 10 spots of oil where the poked sausage basically sprayed on the shirt, this is still an improvement of sorts. Maybe I'll try the hand scrubbing with dawn on the knit polo shirt and risk stretching it.

All of these polo shirts had been through the wash AND the dryer before I started trying to treat them. All of these shirts are probably a more faded blue for having been washed hot so many times, but they were ruined anyway. They still don't look too old to wear to work on casual day.

Hopefully someone searching the internet for this info will find my blog and this will help someone else out!

Saving up for a lazy day

My due date for my baby is Oct 1st, which means that I'm about 7 months pregnant and will give birth in about 3 months. Who ever said women were pregnant for 9 months was just full of crap. Of course maybe they meant that after you KNOW you're pregnant, you have 9 more months to go from there... anyway.

I know how lazy I am about real cooking right now, before I have a baby to deal with. I recently did an inventory of our freezer because it was loaded yet I didn't feel like we had anything out there. Turns out most of the food out there was not quick food and therefore usually got dismissed as unacceptable for dinner tonight. We had ground beef, pork chops, steaks, tater tots, a whole turkey, a rack of ribs, and raw sausages (as opposed to brown and serve). "This is dumb," I says to myself. "Just cook more you lazy butt!"

So this weekend I did! We put the turkey in the fridge to thaw last Wednesday and I cooked it today. We love turkey and typically cook it for a non-holiday several times a year. Usually, we have some friends over and put on a whole feast and we all take leftovers home. I wasn't up for that this week, or rather my house was not prepared for that this week, so I'm trading some meat for a hashbrown casserole with a lady at work. I don't know how many pounds that huge turkey was, but we've got 9 beautiful containers of harvested turkey meat lined up in the fridge tonight. I've been known to take pictures of my stacked turkey meat in the fridge. And we've already eaten off it twice today! We'll eat on it all this week for lunch and dinner and when we start slowing down on it later this week, I'll package it up to freeze some to use in casseroles later. The big reason I don't cook casseroles more is that they usually call for X number of cups of cooked, diced chicken, which we never have just sitting around. This will solve that problem!

One of the nesting type preparations I'm hoping to accomplish before our little boy shows up, is to have a stack of frozen casseroles in the freezer that take zero brain power to cook, but merely a day's forethought. As in, move it from the freezer to the fridge on Monday night. Tuesday night bake for 30 minutes and eat. In essence, I'm saving up for a lazy day. Another thing I LOVE to eat but hardly ever do, is properly cook green beans. They really are about a thousand times better when they've been cooked with pork fat for 8 hours before you try to eat them. So today, after I wrestled the turkey into the cooker, I put on a pot of green beans to cook all day. Five cans of green beans with 5 slices of bacon in the pot. They sat around on low (or just warm while we were at church) for 8 hours straight. Then I let them cool and packaged them up to freeze. So now I have 5 cans worth (in 5 freezer bags) of really good green beans in the freezer, saved up for a lazy day! I bought a flat (12 cans) yesterday, so maybe I'll do that again next weekend. We'll see (don't hold your breath).

Also I put up some meatloaf this weekend. That sounds odd, but isn't really. I defrosted beef and sausage, mixed up all the raw ingredients, bagged it up again and froze it raw. This way, all the gross part (wrist deep in raw meats) is done! That's the part I always dread. Now all I have to do is defrost the meatloaf goo, form it into loaves and bake for 45 minutes! With 12 minutes of forethought, I can still have a clean kitchen and meatloaf in an hour! Two batches of meatloaf saved up for a lazy day! With green beans if I like!!

I'm so proud of me! I've cooked or prepared food a whole lot of this weekend and my kitchen is still clean at 9pm on Sunday night! Miracles never cease!!!

Now I just have to fold the rest of the laundry, pick out outfits for this week, and go to bed. Piece of cake!