It occasionally happens that food is burnt onto my stove. It’s a STOVE, for Christ’s sake! You make food on it, and it is extremely hot. These things happen.

Yet, somehow through the evolution of stove technology, it has continued to seem acceptable to cover stoves with a substance that scratches off when scrubbed. I am not talking a scouring pad here. I am talking the innocent green side of a normal kitchen sponge. My stove is covered in a nice pale-yellow-tan coating that these same genius stove desingers seem to think is attractive. Problem is, you can’t USE this pretty stove, lest it simultaneously get very hot and get food on it (as previously discussed, a likely occurrence). The food will just have to cake on, layer upon layer, because even that will look better than a scratched up stovetop.

An added frustration: Somewhere along the line, someone got frustrated with not being able to scrub their stovetop and added these little metal food-catchers beneath the coils. This helps reduce the amount of food that gets on the pretty pale-yellow-tan part of the stove, but sadly, YOU CAN’T SCRUB THOSE, EITHER. Mine are presumably made of aluminum and have a shiny finish on them. The shiny finish immediately jumps ship at first contact with the green side of the sponge.