The Answer to the Spoon Mystery...

You all had some good and interesting guesses, but the answer is....

I melted the spoon in the dishwasher.
It fell down onto the heating element.
I didn't realize it until the house was filled with smoke and it smelled like burnt rubber.
There was black smoke coming out of the dishwasher.
Nice.

The dishwasher, along with all the items inside, smelled like burnt rubber.
Nice.
Melted rubber is EXTREMELY hard to wipe up.
No matter what concoction I attempted, it just smeared and looked worse.
I finally gave up and scrubbed the heating element as best I could.

Then I went to the store and bought this...

It says it removes limescale and rust, so I thought it had to be potent enough to remove the burnt rubber and get rid of that HORRENDOUS smell.
It helped a little.

I was watching the Today Show one morning and they said to run Tang in your empty dishwasher once a month to give it a good ole cleaning....

So I did just that.  I ran Tang through my dishwasher.

It helped a little.

Then I rewashed all the dishes that were in there during the Molten Spoon Incident and the smell improved.

With each cleaning the smell gets a little better, but there is still smeared black "goo" in the bottom of my dishwasher.

Any suggestions on removing melted rubber??

I'm game for anything!