Over the weekend Roy and I visited a “junk sale” at an old house nearby. We each found something we’ve been wanting a long time – Roy got an anvil for his blacksmithing and I got a big cast iron kettle for cooking over a fire. The kettle was in good shape except that a can of motor oil had spilled in the bottom and was standing several inches thick. The kettle was buried under a lot of other “junk” in the house, so there is no telling how long it had sat there, soaking in.

The family we bought it from, emptied and wiped it out, but you could see the soaked in stain. We decided burning it out would be the best way to clean it. We put the kettle upside down on a hot fire and let it burn down. There was alot of blue smoke while it burned.

Then we built the fire up again and set the kettle rightside up and built a fire inside it. We let this burn itself out , too (we had company over, so we baked 8 potatoes in it while it burned). We then set  it off  the firepit to cool slowly and decided it looked completely clean.

A couple of days later, I washed it well, let it dry in the sun, and then rubbed it down with cooking oil, inside and out. It should be ready for a pot of soup, although I may decide to boil a pot of water first, just to be safe.