Kitchen rules [family]
Jan. 2nd, 2023 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rebeccmeisterGrowing up, my parents established a household division of labor whereby my mother did the cooking and my father washed dishes. However, that obscures the fact that my father actually did do at least some of the cooking. He was in charge of Saturday morning pancakes and Sunday morning breakfast (hash browns and scrambled eggs).
As such, in the years spent with him in the kitchen in various capacities, I had many opportunities to observe his kitchen behaviors. Whenever he did the cooking, he was very strategic about his use of kitchen implements, because he approached cooking as an optimization problem whereby one should attempt to dirty the fewest dishes possible while preparing a meal. He had a pretty dialed-in choreography for making pancakes, for instance, something that I've basically adopted for my own circumstances.
I'm not sure if he explicitly taught me the "clean as you go" cooking method, or if that was something I picked up further down the road, but in my own cooking, hilariously, sometimes I manage to go overboard and start cleaning up dishes before I've actually finished using them.
My mother seems to have adopted a slightly different cooking strategy. I believe it's a strategy where the goal is to have food assembled swiftly, probably originally to appease small, whiny children who then proceed to turn their noses up and pick at things anyway. This tends to result in 6 extra dirty pans, 12 extra spatulas, 22 forks and 3 butter knives strewn about when dinner arrives on the dinner table.
My father was always incredibly patient about this stylistic difference. If anything, he would give a sigh before rolling up his sleeves to get to work, and the dishes would get done. I would note that he definitely DID teach me about the correct order of operations for handwashing dishes. At some point in the Scrabble Society era, the topic of dish handwashing methods came up, and caused me to eventually look up a WikiHow that very much affirmed my father's approach. Hot water in the soapy dishpan first, glasses and utensils first, rinse pan of clean hot water, wash the greasy cookware last. That's the gist of it.
I could never seem to master his packing algorithm for the dishwasher. I don't think any of us did. If we saw fit to attempt to load the dishwasher, that would be all well and good, and then just before starting it he would go back through every single dish to reposition items just so. The dishwasher would always be run only when it was exactly Full.
As a result of this, I absolutely hate dishwashers and refuse to use them for anything more than an extended drying rack.
Actually, that's not completely true. I generally avoid using them because if it's just me in a household, I never fill the dishwasher in time to run it before the dishes in it begin to fossilize.
At some point over the course of household negotiations in New York, I came to realize something. For me, the vastly preferable system for the kitchen division of labor is to divide things up according to cooking AND cleaning days, rather than creating a division between cooking and cleaning.
This is because to me, it is important that whoever does the cooking comes to appreciate the direct dishwashing consequences of their cooking style. Then he or she can make decisions about what they want to do about it all.
On weeknights, S and I do try to alternate cleanup; for those occasions we are typically eating leftovers rather than doing a lot of cooking. I still tend to do a bit more strategic dirty dish queuing, but that's a difference that must be lived with.
In light of this, it's now rather jarring whenever I wind up encountering people who assume the split cooking/cleanup approach is the correct social default. Especially when a big production is made of the whole "cooking a special meal just for you" without attention to the time and effort involved in cleanup afterword.
On the other hand, it remains true that it is way more entertaining to wash someone else's dishes than it is to wash one's own dishes. For the past several weeks, I've been bribing myself to be diligent about washing the dishes by making myself wait to eat dessert until after the dishes are done. The way my daily energy is, my default would be to wash dishes in the morning, but as Office Mouse makes clear, kitchen fastidiousness in the evening is requisite during Mouse Season.
As such, in the years spent with him in the kitchen in various capacities, I had many opportunities to observe his kitchen behaviors. Whenever he did the cooking, he was very strategic about his use of kitchen implements, because he approached cooking as an optimization problem whereby one should attempt to dirty the fewest dishes possible while preparing a meal. He had a pretty dialed-in choreography for making pancakes, for instance, something that I've basically adopted for my own circumstances.
I'm not sure if he explicitly taught me the "clean as you go" cooking method, or if that was something I picked up further down the road, but in my own cooking, hilariously, sometimes I manage to go overboard and start cleaning up dishes before I've actually finished using them.
My mother seems to have adopted a slightly different cooking strategy. I believe it's a strategy where the goal is to have food assembled swiftly, probably originally to appease small, whiny children who then proceed to turn their noses up and pick at things anyway. This tends to result in 6 extra dirty pans, 12 extra spatulas, 22 forks and 3 butter knives strewn about when dinner arrives on the dinner table.
My father was always incredibly patient about this stylistic difference. If anything, he would give a sigh before rolling up his sleeves to get to work, and the dishes would get done. I would note that he definitely DID teach me about the correct order of operations for handwashing dishes. At some point in the Scrabble Society era, the topic of dish handwashing methods came up, and caused me to eventually look up a WikiHow that very much affirmed my father's approach. Hot water in the soapy dishpan first, glasses and utensils first, rinse pan of clean hot water, wash the greasy cookware last. That's the gist of it.
I could never seem to master his packing algorithm for the dishwasher. I don't think any of us did. If we saw fit to attempt to load the dishwasher, that would be all well and good, and then just before starting it he would go back through every single dish to reposition items just so. The dishwasher would always be run only when it was exactly Full.
As a result of this, I absolutely hate dishwashers and refuse to use them for anything more than an extended drying rack.
Actually, that's not completely true. I generally avoid using them because if it's just me in a household, I never fill the dishwasher in time to run it before the dishes in it begin to fossilize.
At some point over the course of household negotiations in New York, I came to realize something. For me, the vastly preferable system for the kitchen division of labor is to divide things up according to cooking AND cleaning days, rather than creating a division between cooking and cleaning.
This is because to me, it is important that whoever does the cooking comes to appreciate the direct dishwashing consequences of their cooking style. Then he or she can make decisions about what they want to do about it all.
On weeknights, S and I do try to alternate cleanup; for those occasions we are typically eating leftovers rather than doing a lot of cooking. I still tend to do a bit more strategic dirty dish queuing, but that's a difference that must be lived with.
In light of this, it's now rather jarring whenever I wind up encountering people who assume the split cooking/cleanup approach is the correct social default. Especially when a big production is made of the whole "cooking a special meal just for you" without attention to the time and effort involved in cleanup afterword.
On the other hand, it remains true that it is way more entertaining to wash someone else's dishes than it is to wash one's own dishes. For the past several weeks, I've been bribing myself to be diligent about washing the dishes by making myself wait to eat dessert until after the dishes are done. The way my daily energy is, my default would be to wash dishes in the morning, but as Office Mouse makes clear, kitchen fastidiousness in the evening is requisite during Mouse Season.
