Oh, the irony...

For our Thanksgiving dessert, I made little pumpkin cupcakes using our pan that is shaped like roses...It looks like the one on the left. It turns out some pretty cool cupcakes but I find it terribly difficult to clean! After scrubbing it multiple times, I gave up. It still had little bits of cake stuck in the petals and I just couldn't seem to get it out. Andrew said that he could do it.

Yeah, right...I thought.

So, our pan sat in the sink for the rest of the week--soaking.

After the Integrative Biology social, we were left with a lot of leftovers, including gallons and gallons of Tang. We had made 5 gallons of it and I think we had 3 1/2 gallons left over, or something equally outrageous. Andrew emptied the big container of Tang into everything we owned that held liquids so that we could wash the container and give it back to my parents. After filling up virtually every container we owned, he was left with a little bit of Tang and just dumped it down the sink. Well, you all know what was still sitting in the sink. That's right, our cupcake tin. So naturally, it got filled up with Tang, too. And then it sat there all night long and well into the next day.

When I finally got the nerve to look in the sink, I admit that I was kind of disgusted. Great, I thought, now we have a cupcake tin full of mushy cake stuff and Tang. Andrew, upon seeing my face, said, "Oh, don't worry about that. Tang is...uhhh...better than dish soap. Yeah. You...uhhhh...soak things in it and it comes right out. I...uhhh...left it like that on purpose." Well, I know a lie when I hear one, especially if it is Andrew who is trying to lie because, well, he can't.

So, he picks up the cupcake tin, starts scrubbing and, what do you know, everything came off just fine. He's like, "Uhhh, yeah...see...I told you Tang works well. It leaves this white film all over the dish and then once you wipe it off, it just takes everything off with it. Cool..." Again, a very botched "cover-up" on his part. But, he got the dish clean, so I can't really complain.

That night we sat down to dinner and for a beverage we had Tang (we're trying to reclaim our refridgerator which has been full of meat and salad and Tang for the last week). Andrew was telling me about how NASA created it for astronauts and how it's so cool because it's astronaut food. I was like, "Yeah, right...whatever. NASA has better things to do than sit around creating fake orange juice." So, he looked it up on Wikipedia to prove to me that NASA created it. We found out that NASA didn't create it, but it is the drink of the astronauts. (So, I was right, yet again!)

We continued reading the article and stumbled across this:

• An often heard household tip says Tang is an excellent dishwasher cleaning agent due to its high citric acid content. Although Kraft does not recommend it, they also do not advocate against this use. Their web site says:

"We have heard that some consumers have used TANG Drink Mix to clean their dishwashers. TANG does contain citric acid which can act as cleaning agent. TANG Drink mix is intended to be a food product and Kraft Foods does not advocate its use for any other purpose."

Who'd have thought that Tang was a good dish cleaning agent? Andrew discovered it by accident, but apparently some people use it on purpose! So, next time you have a dish that you just can't get clean, do wht the pros do! Soak it in Tang!