My Mother-in-law is brilliant

How many times do you hear that?  First of all I do love my MIL.  I have always said I am one of the luckiest people in the world because I have such wonderful in-laws.  However this tip she gave me was so helpful.  You see many years ago, when we were first married, I had canned some peaches with my mom (it might have even been before we were married).  Well, Brandon thought they were quite good, so not long after we were married he was at an estate auction and decided to buy me some canning jars that they were selling by the box.  Being new to auctions, however, he was not aware that since it was “choice out” he should go select the boxes he wanted right away and ended up with an interesting assortment of jars -lesson learned.  Well over the years I have done some canning and used some of the nicer jars in the collection (I had no idea how to get the others clean -they were dirty and had a white film on them) but this year I’ve done quite a bit more canning and needed more jars.  Well, once upon a time my MIL had told me how she cleans the glass items she gets at estate sales to get them usable again -denture tablets.  So I decided it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try.  I sent Brandon out to pick up some cheap denture tabs from Walgreens but because they were on sale, of course they didn’t have any.  So off to Family Fare -I needed them right now! (I have since tried the dollar store variety and I would say they work just as well)  My mom-in-law said she just puts the item right into the water with the denture tabs and then washes them.  I had already washed the jars in the dishwasher hoping that it would be enough, not so.  So I loaded some into my handy rubbermaid dish pan (the big one I use for camping) and filled them with the warm water and denture tabs.  Next I scrubbed them with my “bottle” brush and ran them through the dishwasher.   They came out great!  Some of them still had a very light milky white film but the insides were sparkling clean and smooth.  I have since done some experimenting with pre-washing vs. not, different brands of tablets etc.  I found that because some of mine were exceptionally dirty prewashing did seem helpful and didn’t seem to have negetive effect on the final product.  I focused on the inside of the jars by putting a tablet in each jar and letting the solution flow into the water surrounding the jars but I think next time I might add a few tablets to that water too.  Here are some pictures of the process.  The first picture is the “before” picture.

  This is after one time through the soak process. this is after a second run through (just to see if it would make a difference  To be honest, the “Kerr” jar had such a serious film even after the second treatment, I took a steel wool pad to the caked on stuff you see at the bottom in the second picture (I did try this on some of my larger jars that had just the light film and it didn’t make any difference) I ended up not being sure which of the Kerr jars was the one I started with (note the others in the background)