Care for your Castle, Eldis' Top Tips for a Hygienic House - Kitchen Edition

Kitchen Edition

Ah, the kitchen. As someone who loves to cook and bake, this is certainly one of my favourite places in the house! It can also be such a place of community, cooking or baking and eating together. Although, with me living on my own, the ‘community’ in the kitchen is usually me and my dearest cat Goose, who always hopes I am in the kitchen to give him food. I keep the box with his kibble and the treats in the kitchen, after all. I love

being in my kitchen, rummaging around, figuring out things to cook and singing along with my music. But it is my least favourite place to clean. Yes, in this fourth ‘Care for your Castle’ edition we have finally arrived at a location I don’t like cleaning. Miracles do happen! It’s just that the kitchen is one of those places that you just have to clean all. the. time. It never stays clean! Even when you’re done cleaning, it’s often still dirty! Why!?

As ever, this series is intended as a starting point. My cleaning strategy might not work for everyone, so please adjust it as you see fit. However, many people get overwhelmed when confronted with their messy house, and don’t know where to start. I know not everyone is physically able or has the mental energy to constantly keep everything

neat and clean. With this series, I hope to give you some sort of instruction manual that creates some direction and helps you mentally and physically chop the task of keeping your home clean into bite-sized bits. Use the articles as a red thread or support as you find your own way to keep your house a pleasant, homely place to stay.

So. The kitchen. Before we can keep it clean, we have to keep it tidy. And when we want to keep it tidy, we might have to throw some unnecessary stuff out. Because, and I need you to be honest now, do you need that appliance? Look me in the eyes and tell me you need that waffle-maker you haven’t used since 2016. Or the magic bullet you impulse-bought when you decided you would turn your life around and start

each morning with a smoothie, but which is still in its original packaging. And that fancy coffee machine that requires 73 steps to actually get coffee out of it, when in the mornings you’re already too tired to even press a single button? You can sell that cake-pop machine so it can make someone else happy, you’ve only used it once. That already saves you a lot of room in your storage & on your kitchen counter.

I would recommend removing app appliances you do not actively use every day from your kitchen counter. For me, for example, I’ve got my kettle in one corner, because I drink a hideous amount of tea each day. I used to have this ancient coffee maker on my counter as well, but I moved that to storage when I found a moka pot for cheap in a thrift store and started making coffee with just that. Similarly, I dont have, say, my blender on the counter, since I essentially only use that to blend soup (check out some nice recipes on pp. 15-9 of our Winter ‘21 edition!). Additionally,

what I have learned about keeping the kitchen clean, is to have a good system. Have one specific spot for dishes (NOT in the sink) that’s out of the way, and that doesn’t take over your entire kitchen. I have about 50 cm of free counter space in between my sink and the wall. This is where my kettle is located for socket-related purposes, and where I have placed the water bottles I frequently use. This means I don’t really have the room to properly use that bit. But it is the perfect place for my dirty dishes, leaving the rest of the counter clean and empty for me to do my thing.

Dirty Dishes

Do the dishes every single day. Yes, it sucks, I know, but it is better to do a few dishes regularly than a lot of dishes at once. Please try to avoid just storing dishes in the sink, that’s only impractical when you actually want to go and clean them. I usually do the dishes after dinner, but if it is too late I do them the next morning. I rarely wait longer than that. There is also simply no room for me to procrastinate longer, since the counter where I place my dirty dishes is filled quickly! I highly recommend your go-to space for dishes is also quite small. Don’t forget to clean your drying rack

itself frequently as well, since soap stains tend to get clogged up in and on there. If you’re one of those lucky bastards who has a dishwasher, just put your dirty dishes in the moment you don’t need them anymore and turn on the machine after dinner! Either unload it the same evening or the next morning. Please note that dishwashers have filters that need to be rinsed and/or replaced. Check out your dishwasher’s user manual for more information. Don’t remember where you put that? User manuals are usually available as a free pdf download on various websites.

How often do you replace your dish brush?

How often do you have to replace your dish brush? That highly depends on how often you use it and what kind of meals you make! Replace your brush about every 4 to 6 months, or when you see the following symptoms:

• The brush starts to smell

• The brush starts to lose its brushes

• The brush starts to look worn

If your brush is dirty, or you just want to make sure that it’s hygienic, put the bristle-part of your dish brush in a cup of white vinegar & a drop of dish soap, and leave overnight.

Do you hate doing dishes in general? And do you live on your own? Meal prep is your friend. Depending on the size of your freezer, spend one evening each week/fortnight/month cutting and cooking the dishes you want to eat for the foreseeable future, and freeze those! Then you only use your cutting board and large pots or pans during meal prep. When you reheat, you only need one pan, or possibly two if you need to boil pasta or rice or something similar. But there is no need for cutting boards, multiple frying pans, knives etc. Additionally, if you only use that second pan to boil pasta, you frequently only have to rinse it, not wash it. Meal prepping also makes for cheap but healthy meals. I live on my own so if I buy broccoli I will just have to eat broccoli for 5 days in a row and even then it will probably have gone off by day 4. But if I meal prep it in one day, turning it into my famous broccoli-courgette soup (recipe in our Winter ‘21 edition), I can just freeze the soup and not have the same meal every day! And the food I do eat is very healthy! As I’m typing this, I have

• A chickpea coconut soup, with fresh onion and bell peppers

• Taco filling, with fresh bell peppers, tomatoes, courgette & chilli

• Caponata, with fresh tomatoes, bell pepper, aubergines

• Champignon ‘stew’ with fresh champions and chilli

in my freezer. All made with freshly bought veggies that, if I had bought them and NOT meal prepped them, would have gone off within a week. Now they’ll feed me for at least three weeks! Delicious AND healthy. Yes, meal prep itself is a lot of work, but I schedule around it and just put on a nice series or a movie I can watch with just one eye while also paying attention to my cooking.

Pro tip!

Watch a documentary while doing meal prep! You (or, at least, I) never actually sit down to watch one, since the visuals for many documentaries are not always 100% relevant, it’s either someone talking to a camera or some sort of dramatic reenactment. It’s the sound that counts, so you get to learn something while cooking! Maybe not watch any documentaries on food though, that can either be super demoralising, or you suddenly find all of your hunger vanishing when you discover how xyz product is really made…

Okay, okay, enough of my endless praise for meal prep and how I swear by it. You came here to get cleaning tips, not hear me rant about what great of an invention freezers are, and how much of a boring person I am for genuinely liking veggies.

For those old-fashioned people like me still cooking on actual fire (gas), buy those iron sponges and clean the pits and those iron things you put your pans on once a month, after you’ve done the dishes. Obviously wipe down the stove after each use to remove water- and grease splatters. For those cooking on electric plates, just wipe it down daily after you’ve done the dishes (when it has had enough time to cool down) and you’re good! Clean the wall behind your stove daily, and wipe down the counter after each use.

Don’t forget to clean the handles of your kitchen cupboards daily as well, especially the ones you open during cooking. Some kitchen cupboards are a nightmare to clean, with weirdly shaped handles that make it difficult to reach in the crooks with your cleaning cloth. Good news, though: you can usually

quite easily replace the handles! I have done that recently in my kitchen, which has made cleaning infinitely easier. Make sure you buy new handles that are the same size (same distance between the screws) as your current ones, so you don’t have to drill new holes.

Another thing that has to be cleaned daily (this is why I don’t like the kitchen. There is so much you have to wipe down daily. Like, it only takes 5 minutes, I know, but ugh why can’t stuff just stay clean?!) are your fridge and freezer. Or, well, their doors. Clean the outside where you open them, and dont forget the sides of the door! For the fridge, take out the shelves once every three months (or directly after you’ve spilt something on them, of course) to clean those. Defrost your freezer once a year. Please do this. If you don’t, you will regret it. Yes, I am speaking from experience. If you live in an area where the outside is sometimes as cold as the inside of your freezer, you can just move the contents of your freezer outside while you clean the freezer out. Or clean it when there is not that much inside of it. Clean the individual drawers throughout the year as well. Simply rinse them off with regularly-temperature water, which will already melt away most of the frozen-encrusted stains. Dry properly and thoroughly before inserting it back into the freezer so you don’t introduce

too much liquid. If your fridge smells nasty, put a bit of ground coffee in a small cup somewhere in your fridge to counteract the smell. Try to figure out the source for the smell first though, if there’s something rotting in there you might want to get rid of that and clean the surface it was resting on.

Your kitchen hood tends to gather a lot of dust too. I wipe mine down once a week, just to get the dust off. You can do this while you’re waiting for your pasta water to boil or that sauce to get properly heated, but be careful that the dust doesn’t immediately fall into your food. Also, try to figure out what kind of kitchen hood you have, and, more specifically, what kind of filter it contains. Mesh or cassette filters, made from aluminium mesh strips placed one over the other, have to be cleaned regularly, as do baffle filters made of steel or aluminium frames with curved panels. Charcoal filters are made of fine powdered activated charcoal, which cannot be cleaned but does have to regularly be replaced.

Final Speed Round

Now, unto the speed round: every other month or so, if your fridge and/ or freezer is not in-built, move it to the side to vacuum behind and underneath it. You might also need to carefully vacuum the back of it, since some parts can gather dust, which can become a fire hazard.

Technically speaking, you need to mop the floor of your kitchen every day. Do I do that? No, not at all. Once a week can also be fine, depending on how dirty your kitchen floor gets, which depends on the sorts of things you cook.

Clean your microwave and oven after each use. Of course, give your oven some time to cool down first. If you know you’ll forget to clean it, set a timer to remind you!

Vacuum out your drawers four times a year, and take that opportunity to clean your cutlery tray as well.

Wash your trashcans - not just the one in your kitchen, but that one does tend to get the dirtiest - four times a year as well. Either rinse them out with a hose if you have a garden, or just shower them down.

Replace your tea towels every week if you use them to actively dry your dishes from soaking wet. If you let your dishes air dry and only use your towels to dry the few wet spots left, you can wash them every other week.

I hope this all is not too overwhelming. Like I said, cleaning the kitchen can be a nightmare. If you take out 5-10 minutes each evening after dinner, however, you can already

get a lot done. Listen to your favourite song twice or thrice (depending on how long it is) while cleaning and it’ll make a huge difference.

I hope to see you here again next edition when we’ll discuss your study space!

Do you only have the energy to do one single thing mentioned in this article? Do your dishes daily so they don’t pile up.

How to use the cleaning schedule?

This article is accompanied by the fourth of 6 cleaning schedules, one per area in your house. The use of this schedule is simple: print it out, put it somewhere easily accessible but out of sight (on the inside of a cupboard door, for example), and put a pen near it. Each time you clean your fridge, write down the ..[date].. / ..[month].. (or the other way around, for you Americans) on the dotted lines for reference, so you can keep track! For the once-a-year thing, you can either just cross it off with a checkmark or write down the date there as well for next year, that it’s somewhat balanced (so you dont do it in November and then January of the next year, but instead in June of both years). For the oncea-week thing, you can just cross off the number of the week you have done this. The area marked in dark red is specifically laundry, the rest is general cleaning!