Tiny Choices Q&A: How do you wash dishes?
By Karina | August 22, 2007
Welcome to Tiny Choices Q&A, where we open the floor for discussion on questions which ya’ll have submitted (read the first list of questions here).
Jennifer asks:
What about doing dishes? My kitchen is so small that the clean dishes rest in one side of the sink, which leaves me with constantly running water to clean the dishes. This is not efficient! Help!
I have a pretty small kitchen too. It’s a full sized sink, but not a fancy one with a divider. I have a very small area to put my dish rack (it’s roughly 8 inches wide) on one side, a small counter on the other, and I am prone to cooking for several hours at a time and ending up with a giant stack of dishes to worry about.
To wash my dishes, I should point out first that I do not submerge the dishes in a sink full of soapy water. I don’t pre-soak. I try to wash the dishes as soon as possible after use so there are no crusty spots, and if there are, I scrub with a sponge and some elbow grease instead of letting the water do the work for me.
All that said, I use one of the following organizational methods to sort my clean dishes from the dirty:
- I clean off the counter on the side of my sink and put all of my dirty dishes on the counter. As I wash the dishes, I leave them in the sink to rinse off all at once.
- I put all of my dishes in the sink, and leave a cleared off area on the counter. As I wash the dishes, I put them on the counter to rinse off all at once.
- I leave clean and dirty dishes in the same sink together, separated by an invisible fence. If the dirty dishes touch the clean soapy dishes, I assume that the dirty on the dirty dishes is not virulent and the soap on the soapy dishes will keep the dishes clean.
This way, I don’t have to turn the water on while I’m washing dishes. At the beginning of the wash I either wet my sponge with soap and some water, or, if I’m washing a lot of dishes, I will fill either a dirty pot or a mixing bowl (whatever I’ve got - I’ve used mugs before) with a small amount of hot soapy water and use that to dip my sponge in as I scrub all the dishes. And at the end of the wash, I rinse everything off at the same time, then scrub out the sink and wipe down the counter. I don’t use too much soap, because it takes much longer to rinse off. I also don’t equate “sudsing power” with “cleaning power.” The bubbles may not signify an additionally powerful detergent, but that ingredients have been added to stabilize and augment the foaming power of the detergent.
This is NOT the most efficient way to wash dishes. When I was a scout we would soap up all of our dishes with warm or cold water and then dip them into a single pot of hot water to rinse the soap off. That way we only used a small amount of water and a small amount of energy to heat the water.
What are your thoughts on the matter? How do you hand-wash your dishes?
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Topics: Home, Q&A | 6 Comments »
6 Comments
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yea, i go for option number 1 … pile ‘em up, wash, then rinse. however, i gotta admit that i do love an automatic dishwasher. we are currently shopping for one and will be seeking the most efficient model that we can afford.
another tiny choice is to buy a “greener” dish soap - my personal favorite is from Method (www.methodhome.com). (they also make dishwasher cubes and the best laundry detergent ever).
if you don’t buy their products for the e-friendliness at least check out their advertising campaigns. genius.
we’ve got a Q&A in the works about dishwashing by hand vs by machine, cat147! and another one about effectiveness of various detergents.
sorry for jumping the gun … you guys rock! :)
helpful! i’ll try both ways mentioned (the blog way and the scout way).
we’re at your service! ;)
[...] and mix the soap into the water first before I fill the pot. Most of my dishes are done with the soap-on-sponge method, so it’ s not a problem I run into frequently, so I would like to be able to avoid the extra [...]