— Ellen Speranzo

I like, um, both kinds of cutting boards. Um, when I travel on the road to teach a class, I always bring, um, ones that are plastic or whatever the newest, uh, material is called. So what you're gonna gonna do is, and maybe you heard that thud on the floor, which was a lemon, but you're going to take your cutting board and you're going to cut a lemon in half and then squeeze the lemon juice all over it, because after that, you're then going to take some, I use kosher salt, it's the only time I use salt in my house, and you're gonna pour on about a tablespoon. And with my bare hands, I just keep kind of massaging the wooden, um, top of the board, and you can kind of see dirt actually coming out. And then you'll take a, uh, bench scraper, bread scraper, whatever, and then kind of cleaned it that way and then dry it. And then I stand it up, uh, to let it dry. And that's how my, uh, my cutting board, my wooden cutting boards, uh, stay clean. And you bring up another good point, and that is this, when you're using a cutting board, um, whoops, this happens to be from ikea. I travel when I teach cooking classes with this one, I love it, it's easy. But one thing that I hear from a lot of students who are learning to cut vegetables is that sometimes their cutting board moves. So if you don't have those little safety knobs underneath, you can take a towel, you can dampen it and then squeeze it out really, really well. Lay it out flat and then place your cutting board on top, and the cutting board will not move. So you wanna be as safe as you can, and you certainly don't wanna have a cutting board that moves. So back to the dicing Julianne and keeping your, um, your board clean. And, uh, Ellen, the other thing is you always wanna check your manufacturer's label to see what they also recommend. Um, I know that there are some kind, some types of oil available that, uh, people use, but I keep my boards clean with lemon and salt, and that works very, very well. So give it a try, and thanks for that great question.