memes

The phrase is used to shame people for taking amy breaks at work, which is why people tend to hate it.

Cleaning as you go (if time is available) does result in a lot less work at the end and more about efficiency than laziness. For meals that create a lot of dishes, having someone else clean as you go is even better than puttibg it all on to cook!

My wife hates this philosophy, but when I’m done cooking and ready to plate, the kitchen is spotless.

You know, I'm firmly of the philosophy that a big part of being a good chef is sweeping up behind yourself as you go. Minimizing the volume of cookware and number of appliances I use is also important.

But come on, dude. You're not wiping splattered oil off a hot stove unless you're a masochist. That cast-iron isn't getting touched until it's had time to cool down.

That only works if you didn't start in a messy kitchen. I'll pour the eggs into the frying pan, but I can't clean the bowl until the sink is empty. I can't clear the sink until the dishwasher is empty. I can't unload the dishwasher until my kids stop hugging my legs.

It's one of the reasons I hate having one person cook and the other clean

the incentives are misaligned, and it just breeds bad habits and reckless cooking IMHO. If you do both cooking and cleaning, you'll hopefully learn to clean as you go.

Yeah you gotta do it straight away or very soon after. I try to wash dishes as we go but anything left, if we're watching TV over dinner or whatever, I pause that after we eat and go wash the remaining dishes. Otherwise they aren't going to get done

Mine isn't usually spotless because when it's time to eat it's time to eat, but I always clean as I go. Everything I do in the kitchen starts with a piping hot sink of soapy water.

I absolutely despise the patronizing and bellittling nature of that phrase, and the tone it is usually delivered in...

... But at the same time... cleaning as you cook a complex meal with multiple steps and lots of involved cookware... really really does cut down on overall time spent in the kitchen, and makes for an actually usable and sanitary kitchen.

Worst case scenario, you've got everything but the final used cookware soapily soaking in the sink when you serve and eat... and then right after you eat, you rinse and dry those off, and then clean the final stage cookware and serving plates/utensils.

If you don't have the time or energy to handle cooking and cleaning a complex meal... you don't have the time and energy to just cook it, and then be overwhelmed later by the accumulation of 'dish cleaning debt'.

...

It can be somewhat challenging to learn how to cook and clean at the same time, and avoid getting soap into your food or visa versa... but it is by no means impossible, and is a huge time saver... and you can feel proud of yourself for legitimately learning an extremely useful life skill.

If you just set a rule for yourself or your apartment or house that ... there should basically never be any dishes left in the sink for over an hour... you avoid the massive pile up of dishes and always being overwhelmed and avoiding them... because your rule basically enforces breaking things down into cleaning smaller amounts of dishes at a time, and it also forces the generally positive experience of cooking and eating to be integrated with the generally negative experience of cleaning dishes.

...

I have, waaaay too many times, lived with people who just pile up dishes somehow in the sink and dishwasher, such that it becomes an actual biohazard (I mean it, rotting food and mold, swarms of flies in a sink that hasn't been cleaned in two weeks or more, nobody can even remember if the dishes in the dishwasher are all clean, all dirty, or a mix of both)...

...and that means if you wanna cook anything with a commonly used piece of cookware, ok, now you gotta pull it out of the ratsnest in the sink, hope nobody threw any knives in there to cut your hands on, and get an infection from the festering biohazard... and then also you must now somehow clean this cookware while the sink is completely full.

Which means you have to just clean the entire sink to begin to be able to clean the major cookware you need to begin to cook the food.

...

Hell, the solution that ended up working best for me was to just also throw on a 'no dishwasher' rule.

Force yourself to associate the actual cleaning cost with whatever you are cooking... and the result was that I ended up with a mental health affirming regular structured rule/habit, that I actually ended up genuienly enjoying, as another source of 'i actually accomplished something today'... as well as basically ingraining a better subconscious ability to understand what level of cooking complexity I actually had the energy to prepare.

If you find yourself being often overwhelmed by what you want to make... learn to make simpler recipes, get a rice cooker or crockpot and just have basically a constant supply of something approximating a stew, get an airfryer or toaster oven for rapidly heating up smaller portions, salads are great for you and often have a pretty low prep time.

Save the dishwasher for actual schedule emergencies and hosting an occasional get together or party.

...

Basically, treat dishes as credit card debt.

Pay that shit off ASAP, otherwise, it'll snowball into disaster.

Remove the 'i can handle the dishes/pay this off later' from your mental approach to it, directly associate all the costs together in a very near time frame.

...

tldr; that saying needs a makeover or rebrand.

Maybe:

Clean as you go, dish pile don't grow.

something like that? I am not really a ... sloganeer.