I’ve been a little lax about scrubbing the kitchen sink lately. It’s old white porcelain and soaks up stains like nobody’s business. If I keep up with it, a gentle all purpose cleaner is enough to get the stains out, but when I let it go, it’s usually time to bring out the big guns.

I used to bite the bullet and use a bleach cleaner when the sink got bad, but in addition to being very un-green, bleach cleaners also irritate my lungs.

The sink had a variety of yellowish stains. To make matters worse, we had blueberry pancakes on Sunday, so there was a big purpley-blueish splatter stain right in the middle of the sink where I accidentally dropped some defrosted blueberries.

I remembered hearing something about using salt to absorb a red wine stain and wondered if it would work for blueberry juice. It works for a lot more than blueberry juice. I rinsed the sink out and sprinkled salt around it while it was still wet. After leaving it for about 5 minutes, I scrubbed, rinsed, and repeated. The salt worked magic. And all I used was salt — no other cleaners, no bleach. No need to take my inhaler. No damage to the environment. No plastic bottle. And it worked just as well as a bleach cleaner would.