TNO's Tips & Tricks- Cleaning your cooktop

My husband DH is an amazing man who is a wonderful cook and does so often for our family.

But he's really messy.  Which leads me to my next TNO Tip.

One of the main scary areas after a few meals have been completed is our cooktop.  For whatever reason, our electric cooktop gets the brunt of the mess and looks a little sorry after a culinary masterpiece is created.

This is on a good day.  I was too embarrassed to show it on a bad day!

With these type of messes, it's easy for food to get burnt onto the cooktop and be otherwise really difficult to remove.  I hate wasting a ton of time scrubbing it to perfection because it's just going to get dirty again the next day.  And I've tried almost every cooktop cleaner on the market and none of them work as well as this one amazing product I keep in my pantry...

Yep, that's right.  Just plain old baking soda.  (I swear I use baking soda & vinegar for 90% of the cleaning in my house!)

Here are my really simple steps to clean my cooktop:

1. Sprinkle the entire cooktop with baking soda.

2.  Get a towel or two and saturate them in really warm water.  Wring out just a tad.  (Be careful the water isn't so hot you burn yourself, please!)  Lay the hot towels over the baking soda on the cooktop.

Also, a side note, if you are also a Meijer shopper, don't buy these towels.  I love everything else from Meijer but these are just terrible and actually repel water instead of soaking it up.  It took me about ten minutes to actually get these wet enough to do the job.

3.  Wait 15-30 minutes.  I often forget and come back an hour later.  Don't worry, it will still be sitting there waiting for you.  :)

4.  Use towels to wipe up the baking soda.  If you have really set in messes, it may take a teeny bit of rubbing and scrubbing, but nothing like trying to clean it with other products.  Also, I often will take a wet rag over the cooktop after the baking soda is gone just to get any remaining baking soda I missed.  Otherwise, you'll end up with a streaky cooktop, which also isn't super pretty.

And that's it, you're done!

How do you usually clean your stove or cooktop?