From a bed & breakfast guest:

Your posts on using olive oil have opened the doors and windows for me. I’ve had a grand time with it and you have answered many quesstions I’ve had for years.

When I read your post about cleaning furniture with lemon juice and olive oil, I pulled out my old wooden chopping board. It is dried out horribly and I haven’t used it for a couple years because I didn’t know how to treat it. All the literature says clean it with white vinegar, to get rid of the smell, and then rub mineral oil into the wood. Well, I eat what I chop on the board and I was not going to eat something which had been prepared on wood cleaned with white vinegar (acetic acid) – and mineral oil (petroleum). I wouldn’t put mineral oil on my food, nor would I put it on my body – which means I don’t get professional massages because that is basically what is contained in their massage oil.

When I read your post I thought – what do I have to lose – so I mixed up about 2/3 cups olive oil with 1/2 lemon and went to work on the old board. The next morning I was amazed. It was beautiful. I used the entire amount of olive oil and lemon juice because the board just soaked it up. It is now showing the squares the way it did when it was new. The oil has dried and it is not greasy. I had to wipe the dried lemon off, but that took a second and I am certain the brightness and cleanness of the board is due to the lemon addition, so the extra second was worth the effort.

Thank you! I have my chopping board back; I am not afraid to use it; It is once again a beautiful addition to my kitchen and all is right with the world.

Keep on keeping on. This has made me a loyal reader of your blog and I will also tell everyone I know about this experience.

Somehow, I think this was probably how my grandmother cleaned her chopping board, but I wasn’t listening, watching, or learning from her when she was around. I guess I really missed a lot from being so absent from the older women in my family. They are who should have been my role models. Wish I could pass that bit of wisdom down to my own children and future grandchildren to help make their lives easier. Better to learn from them than from the marketing media, who I learned from and because of whom I must now relearn and try to make a better life for myself than they tried to do for me.

The older women in my family had my best interest at heart, although I didn’t think so at the time. They were not trying to pry all the money out of my pocketbook leaving me with health issues as a result of their wrong-headed advice. A friend of mine even bought “food grade” mineral oil as a present for me to help me with my chopping board. Food grade or not, it is still petroleum and I didn’t use it, although she had all the right arguments to try to get me to use it. I sent her the link to your blog so she could see where she was really an air-head about buying the advice of those who are paid to sell bad stuff. I knew if I waited long enough something would come along to help with these little problems. One down, four hundred ninety- nine to go. Keep those posts coming! God bless you!

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Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

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I love your company. I wasn’t really sold on traveling bed & breakfast, but after trying Bettina’s I am a convert. May it and all of you live long and prosper.

I tried the olive oil and lemon juice and it was FANTASTIC!!!!! I had some left over and went about cleaning other things. Did you know the same mixture cleans brass? I hate to clean brass and we have tons of it from my just married days. We were given a lot and started collecting exquisite pieces, but they can be horrible to clean so we didn’t. Some had turned quite dark. The only time any of our brass pieces were cleaned was when the woman who cleans for us had extra time and she would pick up a piece or two and rub forever. The stuff she used had a foul smell, which lingered in the house for hours.

I used the 0000 steel wool and what was left over from the olive oil and lemon juice mixture I used to clean a couple pieces of wood furniture. It is unbelievable how easy it was to clean my brass pieces – trays, statues, candles. They look beautiful – but best of all I didn’t have to suit-up to spend half a day cleaning brass. I didn’t even use rubber gloves and like you said, my hands are all the better for having done the work.

THANK YOU! And you know I won’t ever stay anyplace else. By the time you help me get my house into a very “organic” state I won’t be able to stay anyplace else. As it is, I am hooked on breakfast at Bettina’s. However, I haven’t turned my own kitchen organic as a result – my husband is a little unhappy paying the extra money for some organic foods, but we have gone completely organic with milk and butter. Eggs are next. Hopefully, he will relent, especially when he sees the money we are going to save on brass polish. The one we bought was VERY EXPENSIVE! I’ve tried to show him that you spend more on some things and less on others when you go organic – maybe this proves the case.

ed. Note: We added the bold type to this guests comments.

_________________________________________________________

Learn More About How We Use Your Donation!

[give_form id=”3763″]

______________________________________________________________

Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

This is a curated blog so you cannot write your responses at the end of each entry. TO RESPOND TO THIS BLOG email bettina-network@comcast.net or info@bettina-network.com

TO LEARN MORE try www.bettina-network.com