You might want to just stop reading now.
Disclaimer: If you have a weak stomach or would like to maintain some strange notion that I am a clean person, you should probably stop reading now. You have been warned. I take no responsibility.
I can, at times, be messy. I can, at times, be lazy. There are often times that I am both at the same time. On the other hand there are times when I get going and I clean everything, and cook actual meals for myself. This is the background for what you are about to read, and what I am going to treat as a public service announcement.
Cooking has a way of creating dirty dishes and various un-edible by-products. In the past couple of months I have learned, due in large part to the messy-lazy lifestyle I tend to lead, several things which should not be done.
One: You should not stack dirty dishes with out first checking their relative sizes. It has come to my attention that my plastic plates have the exact same circumference has my large pot. I became aware of this shortly after a stack of about 5 plates slid into the bottom of the pot and created suction with the water below. I work for about 15 minutes trying to get them all out and only managed to get 4 out. The last one simply refused, despite heating the pot up, twisting the metal, trying the wedge a knife, and banging furiously. The eventual solution required that I freeze the whole then, there by creating a large metal, plastic, and ice hunk that succumb to the laws of gravity.
Two: Awhile back, I made spaghetti. Part of the process involves cooking beef. Cooking beef creates grease. To possibly protect my feeble sink, I poured the grease in the empty can the tomato paste came in. Then the forgetfulness thing kicked in. May I suggest that you not let the forgetfulness kick in when you find yourself in a similar situation. It should be noted that when I say I forgot, I mean I really forgot, as in the can got pushes where I couldn’t see it and I didn’t realize it was there for a few weeks. I knew something didn’t quite smell right, but that isn’t entirely unheard of, but when I did realize it was there, let’s just say it was alive and leave it at that.
Three: So, when the whole live meat grease thing happened, I was pretty determined to not let that happen again (and I haven’t yet) however I created something that really dwarfed the grease. I ended up with a bowl that contained a mixture of leftover blue berry muffin mix and some Crisco. Do not ask me how that happened, just accept it. The muffin mix had hardened and so I filled the bowl with water to let it soak while I went about other business. And then that forgetting thing happened again. Then some strange property of those two elements caused the liquid to form a sealing layer over the top. It didn’t smell, and it didn’t really look all that bad, but danger lay below, waiting. This evening when I went to wash this particular dish I nearly passed out. I am not particularly sensitive to smells (I live near a water treatment plant and it doesn’t really bother me) but I found this truly putrid. I was only able to wash out the bowl sans gagging by tying a shirt around my face. Ok stopping with that before I make myself sick again.
Four: This final one is actually one you should do, particularly if you just dealt with Three. I was scared of what might still be in the drain, so I poured a very generous amount of Dawn straight down the drain, then turned on the water and the garbage disposal. The whole sink filled up with bubbles it was awesome. It popped the guard out of the drain with the power of bubbles and then creates a good 5 inch diameter bubble out of my sink, Stupendous.