Say Goodbye To Stubborn Kitchen Residue With A Liquid You Cook With

Stainless steel appliances look sharp, but they can be a pain to keep smudge-, grease-, and splatter-free. Whether you like your kitchen looking like no one actually uses it (despite someone very much using it all the time) or you go for the once-weekly kitchen deep clean (restaurant-style), you likely wipe down your stainless steel with homemade cleaning mixtures or store-bought sprays. But there's a cooking liquid that will just as effectively buff away all the stains and splatter — and you probably have it in your pantry right now.

That product? Olive oil. It's a real hear-us-out (or rather, try-us-out) solution. But if you pour — or rather, squeeze — just a little bit on a soft dish towel or paper towel, then apply it to the stainless steel by moving your hand in short circles that overlap one another, you'll see all the evidence of people who live in your home and use your kitchen disappear. Your fridge (at least the outside, the inside is another story) and dishwasher will be positively gleaming, like showroom-with-all-the-lights-on-it shining. And it's not just for stainless steel appliances, either. If you have a stainless steel sink, it can make that look brand new, too.

Olive oil doesn't just spruce up stainless steel in your kitchen. It can be used all over your house as a cleaning (but not disinfecting) agent. For starters, if you're painting a room and get some paint on your skin, rather than scrubbing yourself raw, you can apply some olive oil and gently rub until the paint comes off.

If you have kids, you know the damage they can do to your walls with just one crayon and two unsupervised minutes. Olive oil actually dissolves the wax of the crayon, so all you need to do is pour some onto a cloth and wipe at the offending marks on the wall. Likewise with sticker glue. So, if you have a toddler who went a little wild with the "Frozen" stickers –- or you have stickers half-stuck to items when you tried to remove them but the glue was too strong –- take some olive oil to them and let them sit for a bit. Before too long, they should lift right off, gunk and all.