Phew. It's been a busy old time in Rarr land of late.

This weekend was both the culmination of that and also the end of a really mental period of disruption, overtime, crazy work variations, separation, exhaustion and stress. Finally, after three weeks of being all over the place, Mr Rarr and I had some time together - while he also overcame jet lag, the poor thing!

So, as always at Rarr HQ, this involved down time and food. Home cooked, healthy, good food. In this case, it was a pig that "got it" and if I do say so myself, it was damn tasty stuff, but as per usual when I start cooking, the kitchen was a mess, and as I had to drive Mr Rarr back to his work base and then get back to my own for a day, I had to leave some of the washing up despite my best efforts to get on top of it. However, with just one day at work before two off, I was happy to do so, and resigned myself that, whilst it meant coming back to firmly encrusted food remains on my adored kitchen utensils, it at least wouldn't constitute the full-on health risk it would if I had a full working week ahead of me! So off we toddled to get on with life, and I duly trotted home about 48 hours later having stayed with Mother Rarr in the interim.

Yep, the kitchen nightmare was still there waiting for me, having yet again amazingly failed to do the decent thing and get up and clean itself, put itself back where it should be and welcome me with glistening sparkles. Disgraceful. So, on with the washing up.

On my side? No dishwasher for this budget, although surely someone with this much passion for cookery should have been born the heiress to some dishwasher production company of great performance and reputation (and profit, I wish!). No, it was me, a sponge, a pair of Marigolds and, this time, Asda's "Grease Busting" Mandarin & Mango washing up liquid.

***WHAT IS IT?***
Er, washing up liquid. Sorry, I just realised how stupid it was typing that!

This Asda own-brand product is not their base-level saver product but the next stage up in the evolutionary scale, or social hierarchy of washing up liquid, which was with everything goes from the supposed rubbish at the bottom of the pile to high society. This, I suspect, would be at the level that politicians would consider themselves allowed to yell at and insult in the equivalent of our society - but that doesn't tell you anything.

The product comes in a transparent plastic bottle with a flip-top lid and a label. You can see a toxic-looking orange product inside but I have seen far more artificial colours in alternative products.

The product comes priced at 88p for 740ml, giving you a healthy amount of the product if you wash up by hand a lot and also coming in significantly cheaper than the likes of Fairy. But is it as good?

***MY OPINION***
First of all, anyone who read my review of Persil's equivalent to this will know I was really impressed by it. So I wasn't expecting this to stand up against it as, no disrespect to own-brand products or Asda or indeed anyone, I just found that to be a stand-out product.

I had a bottle of this in the cupboard and started it when I ran out of Persil and in terms of longevity, I don't find it has been too bad, although Persil was better. I probably got about the same length of use from this bigger bottle as I did that smaller, but better quality, washing up liquid. However, that doesn't mean this is bad - after all, it has the price in its favour, so thus far, things are even.

Opening the red flip-lid, this is lightly scented of orangey, citrus flavours, although I would be hard-pressed to say Mandarin specifically and I don't get Mango at all. But it is pleasant enough.

When held upside down this will run slightly from the bottle, but a squeeze will produce a fairly standard consistency product. I always put some under running hot water, and some on my sponge, then tackle the glasses first whilst the hot water is running so I can rinse them in properly hot water.

So, what challenges did I throw at this product with a view to writing this review?

First of all there was a cooking bowl with dried wholegrain mustard from the roast veg - this I allowed to soak. Two plates, with residual onion gravy, some mugs, two glasses, some serving spoons and cooking spoons with gravy and other bad news dried on, and some knives.

First of all, the glasses. Fine, no problem, the sponge produced nice small bubbles as the water was doing the same in the sink. The glasses were clean, not sparkling in a "oh God I've found religion" sort of way, but perfectly acceptably clean.

Mugs, ditto.

Plates, spoons and cooking tools, cooking bowl with mustard I allowed five minutes to soak. But, feeling cruel, I took my gravy boat, which was encrusted with my onion gravy, and tried to clean this straight off. I expected to remove the majority but the rest would be stuck firm and require a soak.

Wrong! I was impressed here. This product cut through this quickly, efficiently, and without too much elbow grease from me. Pulling a probably unflattering "impressed" face, I toddled off to leave the rest to soak for a few minutes.

When I came back I lifted out a plate that had previously had gravy scraps dried firm. They were gone already! This stuff must be pretty powerful and I think that the "grease busting" claim of the label is a fair boast from the producers. So I used the same sponge, which was still producing bubbles, and wiped them over and rinsed. Perfectly clean.

The mustard put up a bit of a fight as the sugars in the mix had caramelised and stuck to the side of the pyrex dish when cooking, but again I was pleased with the performance here, and if one will go cooking veg in these things then you get used to have to put a bit more attention into cleaning them.

Knives were fine, no grease linering on the handles, and cutlery was easy to deal with.

I would say that there was barely any scent at all released once this was in the water and steam, which I found usual, but for 88p and a good cleaning performance, and the fact that no artificial scent lingered on my utensils, I'm probably not going to lose sleep over the fact that this didn't also treat me to a fragrant spa experience. Some things are just greedy.

***ALL IN ALL?***
Amongst the supermarket own-brand herd of washing up liquid society, I think I've found a reliable local. The human equivalent would probably deliver the parish newsletter, or dog sit for his neighbour and water his petunias while he's clogging up the M40 with a caravan and a Rover.

It works, really quite well for it's price range, is both perfectly pleasant and unpleasant, and helps wash stuff up. It's a washing up liquid and it's ain't bad, and for 88p, I reckon that makes it pretty good.

Cheers for reading!