So I just had an interesting experience!
I spent the better (?) part of this evening skinning a pumpkin and the time had come to dispose of the waste products of said agonizing process. Just in case you’re curious, while carving pumpkins is all in good fun, to actually remove the outer skin from them without cutting funny shapes for the eyes and nose is ridiculously more difficult, and if I could’ve done this recipe just with the canned stuff from the store, I totally would’ve … but I couldn’t, so I didn’t.
Anyways, naturally I had been doing all of this in the kitchen sink, so when done I just washed everything down the drain and figured, with the flick of a switch, the garbage disposal would whisk away all of my problems much as it has with many other types of food waste stuffs in the past! But this time it didn’t, and insult turned to injury as eventually the incessant grinding noises were accompanied by what I can only elegantly describe as a pea soup mixture that began backing up in the sink. Bits of pumpkin were mixed in, along with the odors of no doubt years worth of food garbages gone passed, and it was around that time that I had the distinct feeling that I was absolutely fucked.
Figuring that I’d leave it to settle its way out for a few minutes (and also because I thought I smelled a burning odor coming from the disposal), I stepped away and retreated to the Internet to verify my findings. The first article that I found wasn’t very promising…
“The slimy pumpkin pulp gums up disposals, sticks to the pipes then hardens like glue to choke your drains.”
Awesome. My drain was now choking on pumpkin remains.
Officially now in a panic, I turned to this article for pretty much any hare-brained idea that I could do myself at 3:00am to somehow miraculously prevent an embarassing call to the plumber on a Sunday morning. I tried using the toilet plunger, I tried dumping boiling water and salt down the drain, and surprising enough, what finally ended up working was me actually getting down there and tearing out the pipes themselves to fish the pumpkin gook out with my fingers! Take my word for it – it was unbelievably disgusting, and I’m not sure which was worse – the stench, the mess just before I got a bucket put in place, or wondering whether I’d actually be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again when I was done!
As far as I can tell, it worked, and I can now run water through the drain without it clogging up. On the downside, the kitchen now smells like all of the nasty crap that had been lodged in the disposal over the years, just about every towel in the house is wet with pumpkin water, and I’m really tired.
Moral of the Story: time to buy a more manly garbage disposal