I'm working on our taxes this week. I need to get them done before I get bogged down with more dental and medical appointments. On top of those, we have 4 spring birthdays, a spring wedding anniversary, a week where my hubby will be out of town, Easter, and a possible surgery for me. So, while my mind is clear I want to get the 2 sets of taxes in.
Now to the question about mild bath soap used on dishes. You know I like to experiment. This morning, I was melting a bar of Jergens soup, the very mild kind. I blend melted bar soap with a little laundry detergent and enough water to fill 2 large jugs of pourable semi-homemade laundry soap. My husband prefers this for his clothes and the towels and bedding as it leaves fabric very soft.
Anyway, as I was washing up the breakfast dishes I wondered to myself if this melting bar soap would work on the dishes. So I poured a little of the melted soap into the washpan of dishes. Here's my conclusion. Melted Jergens soap works on dishes, glasses, silverware and cooking utensils, but not on anything really greasy. The skillet from frying my eggs and turkey bacon needed additional dish detergent. Apparently, bar bath soap is much gentler than dish soap.
The reason I went down this path is my first of two bars of actual dish soap given to me at Christmas has about 1 week to 10 days left on the bar. I still have the second bar for washing, though. So there's no hurry to find a substitute that I like or buy more of these bars myself. This one bar will have lasted about 2 months for us. Buying new bars myself will be more expensive than buying Dollar Tree dish detergent. So I wanted to see if there's something else I could use that would be in bar form. I really dislike the plastic bottle waste and want to find alternatives where I can. So I had to try out ordinary bath and face soap to see if it would work.
One of my original thoughts was I wouldn't like the fragrance of bath soap on my dishes. Then I remembered my grandmother's favorite liquid dish soap -- Ivory. Ivory definitely had a non-kitchen fragrance to it, a lot like their bath soap, as I recall. So, if Jergens soap has a non-kitchen fragrance, at least there's something of a history to dish soap with this sort of scent. It's funny that we like a floral scent on our bodies, but not on our dishes. And we like a citrusy or fruity fragrance on our dishes but not necessarily on the soap we use on our bodies.
Back to my experiment. This is good to know that in a pinch, we could wash the non-greasy dishes and cookware with ordinary bath soap if we began to run very low on the dish soap and couldn't get out to buy more, such as in a storm or when convalescing from an illness or surgery. I'll file this tidbit of information away in a back corner of my mind.
One note of caution -- I made sure to rinse those dishes really well this morning. Bath soap may contain additives that are not food-safe. And I wouldn't want to get any of that stuff on a plate where I plan to put my food. Just so you know, none of the dishes or cookware from my experiment had a soapy fragrance after rinsing. And they passed the finger test for squeakiness, indicating no soap residue left after rinsing.
It seems as if I'm not the only one who has ever had these curious thoughts. Apartment Therapy offers some info in this article about washing dishes without actual dish soap. If you'll recall a post I wrote a while ago about using baking soda to wash dishes, this article suggests baking soda as one of the best dish soap alternatives. Hmmm, now I think I need a second experiment. . . .
