Camping Tip: Find a Friend who Likes Grapefruit

While on The Most Epic Trip I was the dish master for 5 months because Gina is a much better cook than I. During that time I really got creative of how to efficiently clean the dishes, cookware, and utensils. You would be surprised how creative you can really get, since dish washing sucks in the real world, and while camping is 10x more annoying. Actually, now that I remember if you hate washing dishes as much as me I think you should read this article about how to get out of washing dishes.

One night while I was finishing up my portion of dinner, Gina pulled out her nightly grapefruit for dessert. I finished up the grub in the pot and saw the pile of grapefruit skins and asked myself if the skin from a grapefruit would make it easier to clean a pot. The thought was that it was a very acidic fruit and it was large in size.

Damn did it work well! It became a ritual to clean everything with the skin of the grapefruit. The creamy, greasy remnants of food left on pots and utensils easily came off with little effort making the cleaning effort so much easier. The other thing that I noticed was that the smell was completely gone too; everything smelled like a grapefruit.

So like using a deep fryer, we had to try it on everything! It was great! I wiped down the dashboard, steering wheel, center console – basically anything with leather. Instead of being welcomed in the car with a musty, dry, stale smell, we stepped into a grapefruit haven. For two people who are living out of a car, this was a big deal to get that smell out.

I do not eat grapefruit but love oranges and seeing how there are household cleaners out there with orange additives I thought I would try them as well. Unfortunately, it did not do as well as the grapefruit. The orange juice itself after squeezing the entire orange cleaned well, but I would rather eat that part. We had not tried lemons, though I assume they work just as well as grapefruit because they are on the same acidic level, but I am not 100% sure.

If you find yourself being the dish master like me, try using a grapefruit. It makes camping life much easier and in the end you are not wasting anything like wet wipes or water!