A little background, first. I travel quite a bit for work, staying in a hotel one or two nights at a time. There are some weeks I'm gone 6 nights and have 6 different hotel rooms. It's a little exhausting. I always pick up the shampoo, conditioner, etc. to distribute to a homeless shelter or the high school guidance office, and I (used to) always unwrap a bar of soap to use to wash my hands.
It was bothering me to just waste a mostly perfectly good bar of soap, so i was bringing them home. I eventually had the epiphany (that should have been unnecessary) to just find a bar of soap I like, tuck it in my travel bag, and re-use it from one hotel to the next. But until that (DUH!) moment I had been bringing little bars of soap home. "I'll melt them down, cut them back into bars, and they can go to the shelter, or we can tuck a couple in the camping stuff."
Jeff would just look at me and say ok. It's like he knew.
Anyway, I finally took all those little bars of soap and decided to melt them. I put about half into my 6 qt stock pot and the other half in my glass measuring/mixing bowl. The ones in the pot, I turned on the heat, and the others, I microwaved. I reasoned that there must be one better way to melt the soup, and being scientifically minded I did a side-by-side comparison.
Neither is a good way.
The microwaved bars softened, then started to both darken and foam. The stovetop bars didn't do much but get hot.
So, I Googled it. Watched a YouTube video. OH. Ok. Put *all* the soap in my biggest stock pot, covered it with water, let it sit for two days to soften. Today I cooked it down.
You know, soap kind of gels with water. I'd forgotten about that. Also, if you cook soap, your whole house smells like hotel soap. I guess there are worse smells...
Anyway I now have a muffin pan and a large baking sheet full of cooling soap muck and I poured the other half down the drain with a LOT of hot water. What a mess. I'll never do that again.
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