Gnash, Gansh, Grind, Grind

I have no good reason AT ALL to be in as foul a mood as I am today.

And yet there it is.

I hate the world! I hate you all!

Not really, but I am pretty grouchy.

At one point I tried to cheer myself up by taking my Most Gorgeous Dog and going to Petco and the grocery store. This *was* rather fun. Hanging around Emily at Petco is like being (I imagine) in Nicole Richie's entourage. You're with the beautiful girl who is Worshipped and Adored For No Particular Reason (and, she looks like she could maybe eat a bit more--'cause she's a poodle).

But when I got home one of Max's friends came over and a Great Bit of Boy Noise ensued. I just didn't have the patience for it today. I did my best but by dinner time I would have duct taped them all if it wouldn't have interfered with eating. At least dinner came out well. Roast chicken.

So at 8:10 I drove Max's friend home and Max and I went to the Y where I walked very very fast for a great long while on the treadmill until I felt better.

Now I am going to attempt to get some work done and then go to bed. I picked up two of the rustiest, menacing-looking cast-iron muffin pans you ever saw through freecycle last night. I didn't see how bad they were till I got them home. Awed, I went to the Internet to see if there was anything to be done for it short of a blow-torch. I found a few suggestions. So last night I put all my cast-iron pots -- including the relatively new one which was just fine, but had some burnt-on rice on the bottom. It was sort of the control group. I left the pots in the oven on self-clean mode for three hours, then turned off the oven and went to bed without looking.

In the morning I was delighted to find that the pots, all three of them, were in fact, perfectly clean, save but for some lingering ashes. These rinsed right off. Now, the newish pot just needed to be oiled again and re-seasoned. The older pots however, still had their rust to contend with. They were very CLEAN now, but still rusty.

I worked on them a bit with an SOS pad. This worked great -- except that on the back of the pan there were the inevitable nooks and crannies of a muffin pan. Unlike a tin muffin pan, the cast-iron version is very compact. On the back side, there is no real space between the "bumps." The edges come together at the base and the whole SOS pad method is pretty useless.

What to do . . .

If I were a teenager still working at Taco Bell, I'd have stolen a box of red sauce and meticulously opened all the packages and coated the pots in those. That rust would have been gone in 60 seconds. (Needless to say, although I've gotten over the experience enough to eat at Taco Bell again -- I don't ever use the red sauce.)

Instead I went to the grocery store with my big poodle and got four 2-liter bottles of Coca-cola. I brought that home, filled a plastic bucket with it, and submerged the muffin pans for a few hours. This did the trick pretty well. I can still see the faintest of red casts on the back of the tins, one more so than the other, but 98% of the rust is gone. Enough that I have proceeded with re-seasoning all three pots. They're in the oven now, having been generously coated with melted Crisco using a silicon brush.

I wonder if I need to do the seasoning process more than once before using them? I imagine not for the new one. I'm afraid if I jump in too soon with the muffin pans, that I'll end up with muffins welded to my "new" pans. Maybe not if I just generously grease them first.