With most waffle parties, you’re going to have a few waffles left over. Any time you’re making waffles, it saves time and energy to make a few more than you need and freeze a few. This way, you can cook up your favorite vegan waffle recipe and enjoy a tasty treat for a few breakfasts, lunches or dinners during the week.
An easy way to store your waffles is with zippable plastic freezer bags. However, these bags are not always the easiest thing to wash out under the spigot, depending upon how much space you have available in your sink. And they’re a horrible thing to be sending to the landfills. Thus, I am quite excited to possess a simple yet innovative product that seems a perfect complement to the waffle: a device for washing and reusing plastic freezer bags in your dishwasher, called the Bag-E-Wash. It’s designed and sold by Jeannie Piekos.
It came packaged quite sustainably, inside – yes, you guessed it – a zippable freezer bag. Outside of the envelope, the only materials were a thank-you message and a small assembly instruction card, all recyclable. No waste here!
Putting it together didn’t take more than 5 minutes. The only improvements I could recommend would be a slightly clearer first image on the instruction sheet (although that would require using more material for the sheet), and clarification that when you connect the tops of the blue blue bands to one another, you connect each band to the one nearest it–not the band across from it. Outside of that, it was pretty simple. Unlike some self-assembly products, there didn’t seem to be any risk of hernias or other injury with this one!
The construction is quite sensible. It’s very adjustable, and has clips that the “zippers” slide under so the bag isn’t jettisoned off the top. The picture at the right, courtesy of Jeannie Piekos, shows several of the devices placed into the bottom rack of a dishwasher.
Before placing it in the dishwasher, I tried it on as a hat, but I can’t seem to find the picture that Jen took of me wearing it . . .
To test it out, I took a little spaghetti sauce and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that had been left in the fridge a little too long, and thoroughly smudged up the bottom inside of the bag. I figured that if these goodies were washed out, then there would be no issues at all with waffle remnants.
After a standard wash, the bag came out very clean, and was soon storing some frozen waffles. We’ve had equal success with at least three gallon-sized bags since then. The Bag-E-Wash is also flexible enough so that can be left in the bottom rack, with other items being loaded around it. It is also designed to work with two sandwich or quart size bags at once, but we haven’t tried that yet.
I’d encourage getting one or two of these for anyone who regularly makes waffles. As Piekos notes, “one box of (30) gallon size bags washed with Bag-E-Wash and reused 50 times each keeps 1,500 bags out of our landfills and oceans and saves $150!” You can check out Bag-E-Wash.com for information on this and several related products.