Excerpt: Joey Green's Fix-It Magic

July 15, 2008 — -- If you're looking for fun, off-beat ways to fix things around your home using brand-name products you own already, then "Joey Green's Fix-It Magic: More than 1,971 Quick-and-Easy Household Solutions Using Brand-Name Products" just may be the book for you.

Bestselling author Green is the guru of weird uses for brand name products and documents a host of creative uses in his new book.

Readers can learn how to start a car with Bayer aspirin, spackle holes with S.O.S. steel wool pads or even clean driveway spills with Coca-Cola.

Read an excerpt of the book below.

Barbecues

Cooking

Forster Toothpicks. Identify rare, medium and well-done steaks on your barbecue grill by using colored Forster Tooth-picks to mark steaks on the barbecue.

Maxwell House Coffee. A clean, empty Maxwell House coffee can doubles as an excellent disposable pot to be used on the grill to cook bratwursts in beer.

Morton Salt. After barbecuing, sprinkle Morton Salt over the smoldering charcoal to prevent the embers from flaring up into a roaring fire again.

Grill

Arm & Hammer Baking Soda. To clean a barbecue grill, make a paste by mixing equal parts Arm & Hammer Baking Soda and water, apply with a wire brush, wipe clean, and dry with a cloth.

Cascade, Glad Trash Bags, and Parsons' Ammonia. To clean caked-on grease from an outdoor barbecue grill, place the grill in a Glad Trash Bag and add one cup Parsons' ammonia, one cup Cascade dishwasher detergent, and two gallons hot water. Secure the bag closed. (The fumes from the ammonia help weaken the bond of the baked-on food and grease.) Let sit for forty-five minutes, then hose down the grill and wipe clean.

Dawn Dishwashing Liquid and Glad Trash Bags. Mix up a solution of one-half cup Dawn Dishwashing Liquid and one gallon water. Place the grease-coated barbecue grill inside a Glad Trash Bag, pour the soapy solution over the rack inside the bag, seal the bag shut, and let sit overnight. The following day, scrub the rack with a wire brush and rinse clean.

Easy-Off Oven Cleaner and Glad Trash Bags. Place the grill in a Glad Trash Bag. Wearing protective eyewear and rubber gloves, spray the racks thoroughly with Easy-Off Oven Cleaner, close the bag, and secure with a twist tie. Let set for four hours in the sun. Rinse well with a garden hose.

Glad Trash Bags. When your outdoor barbecue grill cools down, cover it with a Glad Trash Bag to protect it from the elements.

Pam Cooking Spray. To make cleaning a barbecue grill easy, coat the grill with Pam Cooking Spray before barbecuing. After cooking, when the grill is cool to the touch, scrub the grill with a wire brush. The cooking oil enables baked-on food to slide off much easier.

Reynolds Wrap. To make cleaning baked-on food from a bar-becue grill easier, place a sheet of Reynolds Wrap on the hot grill immediately after you finish barbecuing and close the lid. The next time you use the barbecue, peel off the foil, crumple it into a ball, and scrub the grill clean, easily removing all the burned-on food.

WD-40. To clean baked-on food from a barbecue grill, remove the grill from the barbecue, spray with WD-40, let set for five minutes, then wipe clean. Then wash thoroughly with soap and water.

>Windex. To clean baked-on food from a barbecue grill, spray with Windex while the grill is still warm, then scrub with a wire brush. Let cool, then rinse well with water.

Igniting

Conair Pro Styler 1600. After lighting a charcoal fire in a barbecue grill, carefully use a Conair Pro Styler 1600 hair dryer set on cool to fan the flames until the charcoal briquettes catch fire.

Maxwell House Coffee. Using a can opener, remove the top and bottom of an empty Maxwell House Coffee can. Use tin snips to cut a few tabs around the bottom rim of the coffee can. Stand the can in the center of your barbecue grill, place one sheet of crumpled newspaper inside, fill the rest of the can with charcoal briquettes, add lighter fluid, and light the news-paper through the punched holes. When the coals glow orange, remove the hot can with tongs and set in a safe place to let the can cool.

Tidy Cats. Prevent grease fires in barbecue grills by covering the bottom of the grill with a one-inch layer of unused Tidy Cats cat box filler.

Vaseline Petroleum Jelly. Apply a thick coat of Vaseline Petroleum Jelly to a cotton ball to start a fire in a barbecue. The cotton ball will burn for a long time.

WD-40. WD-40 works as a substitute for charcoal lighter fluid. As with lighter fluid, be sure to let the charcoal fire burn off the WD-40 before cooking food on the grill.

Insects

Aunt Jemima Original Syrup. Lure insects away from a barbecue by coating a few small pieces of cardboard with Aunt Jemima Original Syrup and placing them around the perimeter of the yard. Wasps and bees will be attracted to the home-made flypaper instead of your guests.

Budweiser. To attract bees and wasps away from a barbecue and your guests, place open cans of Budweiser beer around the perimeter of the yard. Bees and wasps love beer. They fly into a can of beer, get drunk, and drown — which, if you're a bee or wasp, probably isn't a bad way to go.

Heinz Apple Cider Vinegar. To keep bees and wasps away from your barbecue, fill a large bowl with Heinz Apple Cider Vinegar and set near the table of food. By the end of the barbecue, you'll have a bowl full of floating flies, mosquitoes, and moths. (For more ways to repel insects, see page 169.)

Pots and Pans

Ivory Soap. To prevent barbecue soot from sticking to the bot-tom of pots and pans, rub the bottoms of pots and pans with 4 a bar of Ivory Soap before putting them over an open fire.

Reynolds Wrap. A crumpled-up piece of Reynolds Wrap makes an excellent pot scrubber to clean pots and pans used over a barbecue grill.

Strange Facts

No one knows the origins of the word barbecue. Some linguistic experts say the Spanish derived the word from the Native American Taino word barbacoa, meaning a framework of green wood used as a grill for cooking food over hot coals. Others believe French pirates of the Caribbean cooked animals on spits that skewered the animals de barbe a queue — meaning "from whiskers to tail."

Three out of four households in the United States own barbecue grills. In the United States, the most popular holidays for barbecuing are the Fourth of July, Memorial Day and Labor Day, respectively.

The most popular food for barbecuing in America is hamburgers — followed by steak, chicken, and hot dogs.

A barbecue is called a braai in South Africa, a churrasco in Brazil, and a barbie in Australia. People in St. Louis, Missouri, consume more barbecue sauce per capita than people of any other city in the United States.

Barbecue Bob (Robert Hicks) recorded for Columbia Records from 1927 to 1930 and became the most popular of the Atlanta blues guitarists of his time and Columbia Records's best-selling bluesman.