Clean Your Kitchen Like a Ninja
It is time to work smarter, not harder!
Whether you are a stay-at-home-mom, a work-from-home-mom, or a career-mom, the kitchen has to be the one constant chore that literally never ends, #amiright? And this pandemic has us all at home even more. No daycare lunches, no working lunches, it is just constant feeding of all the children. All. The. Time. And with the food comes the mess. So. Much. Mess.
So how can you stop the never-ending kitchen mess from swallowing you whole?
Ninja it! Okay, I just made that up. But seriously - by being smart and intentional with our movements, we can conquer a big task in less time. It is all about zones.
If you know me, you know that I like to have a place for everything - and apparently that even means during kitchen clean up!
Don’t worry - it is way simpler than it sounds. So simple, in fact, that I didn’t even realize that I was doing it until my Mom asked how I cleaned up after a family dinner so fast.
Kitchen Clean Up Zones
If you have ever worked in a restaurant or watched a cooking show, you have seen that they do as much prep as possible before they actually start cooking. This is so they can minimize the amount of cutting, washing, and running to the fridge during their cook. By doing it all before, they save time.
Kitchen clean up zones are the flip-side of that. By doing tasks in a certain order, and actually organizing the mess into zones, you can save a whole lot of running back and forth in the kitchen. One trip to the fridge, one to the laundry, one to the trash, and one to the sink or dishwasher. That sounds a lot better than buzzing around doing one task at a time, doesn’t it?
My Kitchen Routine
Routine is a saving grace; once you have a good one, you can whip through tasks in no time. I’ve nailed my kitchen clean up routine, and now I’m sharing it with you! The trick is to work with one area at a time, and to keep like items together.
I start with the mess that is the furthest away - the dining room table. As I pick up, I grab similar items, and take them to their “zones”: fridge items near the fridge, spices to the cupboard, dishes to the sink, and food to be wrapped up goes on the counter.
As I bring the dishes to the sink, I make sure to scrape them, then stack them into piles. Plates with plates, cutlery with cutlery, etc. This makes it soooo easy to load the dishwasher when I’m ready.
Leftovers get packed up, then brought to the fridge zone.
Serving and cooking dishes get scraped and stacked in the fridge zone.
It’s like a pre-clean! Once everything is in its proper zone, I conquer each area one at a time. Now I really only have a few central tasks left to do:
Put the fridge items away
Load the dishwasher
Wash any remaining dishes
Wipe the surfaces. And let’s be real - I only spray my counters after dinner. That way, I greet a fresh and clean kitchen the next morning!
See? I told you it wasn’t complicated. By grouping like-tasks together, you aren’t bopping about the kitchen, making individual trips to put the pepper away, scraping one plate at a time, and rearranging the dishwasher again and again to make everything fit.
With all of the meals and snacks we have to prepare as moms, every moment that we don’t need to be in the kitchen is one that we can spend with our kids, or heck - reading a book by ourselves!