Clean as . . .

Anyway, here we are, coming off the holidays with all the attendant big elaborate meals.  So you work and work and work on meal preparation, sit down and eat, and then — there’s the huge mess in the kitchen.  You have to start all over again on ANOTHER big job.  It’s so discouraging!  And I have to tell you that I can get very, very angry and upset if I don’t have the help that I think I deserve with cleanup.  I kind of lost it last week when we had dinner at our house for the family and I was trying to get things sorted out afterwards while Jim and Gideon were, horror of horrors, standing around and TALKING to people.  How dare they?  So, when everyone had gone home, I let them have it.  It was really unfair of me, and probably to some extent spoiled our memories of what had been a lovely evening.  (See the entertaining blog at some point for the salmon with cider/cream sauce that we had:  totally yummy.)

Jim said that he thought we’d just clean up later, and he would have done so.  One big problem with this idea, though, is that our kitchen is the gathering place.  It’s not off out of sight away from where we eat, and that’s true of most houses these days.  We’re supposed to have our guests stand around and watch us cook, pitch in and help, and socialize around the stove.  But that means that they’re in the middle of the mess.  I hate having dirty dishes strewn all over the counter.  I want people to be able to feel comfortable, and how can they if there’s total chaos?  So I’ve struggled and struggled with this problem over all my years of having people over for meals and never really solved it.  But this dinner party was the last straw.  I just had to get a handle on it.  And I realized that I had been completely unfair to the guys because I was expecting them to know what to do without my telling them when I didn’t know what to do.  What did I need?  I needed a plan.

And I was going to have another party that same week, so it was imperative that I get something figured out.  Jim’s sister’s birthday is Dec. 30, so any time she’s here at Christmas we have a celebration as close to the actual date as possible.  On Saturday the 27th there would be 13 people here for dinner, and I wanted to use my china and crystal.  What’s the point of having nice things if you don’t use them?  And they have to be washed by hand.  And I had a fairly elaborate menu.  So what was I going to do?

The principle in this type of situation is that you have to identify the problem first before you can solve it.  We often fail to take five minutes just to think things through.  So, finally, I did just that:  what did I want to have happen that wasn’t happening?  I wanted an orderly kitchen at the end of the meal.  How could that occur?  The dishes couldn’t go in the dishwasher, but they could go into the sink, and if it was full of hot soapy water then they could be washed later with minimal fuss.  I told Gideon and Jim and that I would do everything in my power to keep the cooking mess under control and that we needed to just quickly scrape and rinse the dishes and put them in the sink.  I used disposable foil pans for a couple of the baked things and lined the roasting pan for the beef with foil.  The only items that ended up needing cleanup were the roasting pan rack (which I will line with foil next time) and the muffin pans for the individual Yorkshire puddings (which I need to think through a bit more).  Everything went into the sink and I moved the chafing-dishes off the counter and into the laundry room, out of sight.  We had our lovely desserts and after-dinner drinks (pink egg nog and coffee) without having to stare at the detritus.  While it wasn’t perfect, it was sure better than usual.  I plan to refine the plan.   One thing I do need to keep in mind is that I’m never going to pull off a Downton Abbey affair because I don’t have a houseful of servants.

I was prodded to do this post by a re-airing on NPR this morning about how chefs use something called “mise en place” to keep their kitchens running smoothly and how that whole concept is applicable to home cooks and to life as a whole.  “Mise en place” simply means, in general, setting up ahead of time.  Setup and preparation always, always takes longer than the event itself.  Chefs can easily do a six-hour prep session for a three-hour dinner shift.  I will include a couple of quotations from the story that I found helpful:

“It actually saves times to clean as you go.”  (Amen, brother!  That crusty pot with the remains of the mashed potatoes needs to be soaked and scrubbed right now, before it sets like cement.)

“If you don’t clean as you go it’s a mess.”

“It makes life so much easier.”

The entire story is only about six and a half minutes.  Listen to it here.  I’ll have tons more to say on the topic of getting organized and doing your work ahead of time as 2015 progresses.  A true paradigm shift for me!