Experimenting with homemade dishwasher detergent

It's been snowing for days. Yesterday I was snowed in and ran out of dishwasher tablets. Darrell was to bring some home, but I was anxious to start up a load. So good old Google helped me out. I found out that many people are making their own detergent. They do it for various reasons ie frugality, environmental issues, etc. The problem was that all of the recipes called for Borax and we didn't have any of that. So, I made up a recipe: 1 Tbls. salt, 1 Tbls. baking soda, 1 squirt Dawn foam. I mixed in a drop of blue food coloring just for fun. This morning we assessed the results. The overall cleanliness was very good. A glass dish had been quite dirty from a pork roast. One mixing bowl had been used for mixing up gingerbread. To make it a good test, I did not rinse these well. Most everything came out shiny clean. However, 2 glasses had some residue on them- we decided that this often happened with the tablets anyway. Darrell is much fussier than I about such things and his overall assessment was excellent. I mixed up a bigger batch of this stuff and put it in a ball jar. Why do I get so much joy out of doing this kind of thing?