Reset your kitchen, reset your life

I promise there are tips on how to clean your kitchen

The New Year is a good time to hit reset. It’s not the only time, or everyone’s time, but it’s a good time for it. Resetting means something different for everyone: maybe it’s resolutions and hitting the gym, maybe it’s allowing space for a slow reawakening. For me it’s cleaning the kitchen and quitting my day job.

It’s easy to know when you have to reset your kitchen, but it’s harder to know with your life. You don’t see the plates piling up. I’ve needed to reset my life for a few years now.

Last year I started my YouTube channel as a hobby. It’s helped me develop my own sense of identity, reconnect to my values like sustainability, make new friends and deepen my existing friendships. This journey has helped me create space for me, a weird food person. I feel liberated. I can see a version of me, of my life, that I never knew was possible.

But it has come at a cost. In 2022 I was working full time, I was learning how to film and edit a cooking show on evenings and weekends, and during this time my house was under the constant siege of my often delayed renovation. I had no space in my life, like a sink too full of dirty dishes. All I could do was wash the plate I needed in that moment and hope some of the soap trickled onto everything else I’d been ignoring for days.

If you’ve ever tried to cook in a dirty kitchen you will know that you can’t. After a big day of cooking you must reset the kitchen, you must make space.

For 2023, I am taking the year to work full-time as an Internet Food Person, whatever that means. It’s not going to be easy. I still need to figure out how to make money, figure out if I enjoy the work, and re-learn how to socialize without work as a social distraction. Without all the Zooms to consume my social capacity I may actually have capacity for a dinner party. I might only have capacity for a nap.

As part of this announcement-disguised-as-a-cleaning-article, I’ve also enabled paid subscriptions on Substack. It’s a way for you to support what I’m doing directly.

These last few years, even without a kitchen – I had a year with only a mini fridge, a hotplate, and a toaster oven – I found space to cook. Cooking is my source of joy and connection. Early in the pandemic, my nieces would come over every weekend for a marathon day of cooking together, at least until I tore the kitchen apart. People say cooking is their therapy, but I think that diminishes the value of actual therapy, which I go to and think everyone should go to. I think what people mean when they say cooking is therapy is that it makes them feel better. It is healing. I think of cooking as a meditation. A practice. A way to recenter myself.

I set an intention, my bread will rise, and I breathe.

Like actual meditation, cooking for joy is something I aspire to do and often is the first thing to go when I have no space – emotional, physical, or calendar. As the weeks pass without cooking for joy, that creeping feeling of overwhelm catches up to me and my waistline. Instead of cooking for joy, I end up getting a sandwich at the Eby St. Bodega every day, trapped like Larry David in an obligatory social habit of my own creation, until Anna (who owns the Bodega and also believes in cooking for joy) yells at me to start cooking my own food again. So I cook. I bring Anna roasted cabbage on a dinner plate, instead of wrapped in plastic. I always give people food on dinner plates now as a way to reduce my plastic use. Anna’s New Year’s resolution is to have a full place setting of my dinnerware. Whether her goal is due to the quality of my cooking or my taste in ceramics is as yet unknown.

Instead of a sandwich I buy cheese at the Bodega, and go to Legacy Greens for some produce – I can’t fathom buying actual produce for actual cooking. There’s no space on my counters to cook, they are piled up with boxes from online shopping, waiting to see if I break down before they do.

I buy spinach to disguise the fact that I really want to eat cheese for dinner. Eating a brick of cheese is frowned upon, but if you crumble the same amount of cheese on top of some spinach and post it on Instagram suddenly you’re a health nut.

We can all agree on cheese.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lack of space as I reflect on the past few years. My lack of space for joy. I’ve spent most of the last few years busy, with my literal and metaphorical house in a state of chaos. Making a home office. Selling my business. Renovating the kitchen. Turning the brand-new kitchen into a video studio. Re-making the home office as an editing suite. Working full-time then staying up until midnight editing budgets, editing video, editing ceilings (never drywall your own ceilings).

To make space, I must clean the kitchen. I hit reset.

I need clean countertops. I need everything back into its drawers. I need a blank slate free of old onions, random cloves of garlic, sad spinach I meant to cover in cheese, mixing bowls that don’t need to be out, decorations, pots, mixers, spices, cans of chickpeas – and now the USB and HDMI cables that now snake their way across every corner of my life.

I need this space. This is the space where I find room to be creative and cook for joy. Not sustenance, not recipe testing (my new work), not filming, but for the joy of cooking.

I’m trying to figure out how to make space in my life a constant. This day has been intentionally left blank.

Here’s how I reset my kitchen

I’ve become very good at cleaning my kitchen since starting my YouTube channel. I want it to look consistently clean from video to video. It’s not a standard I think people should live with, I just find it less visually distracting.

First I remove everything from the sink area. The sink area is sacred, and when it is crowded there is no space for anything. I don’t care where the sink contents go. I don’t care that they are dirty – I will need to clean the counters later anyway. All I care about is that I need to make space. So I empty the dishes of water and move them until I have enough space to the left of the sink for what I’m cleaning, and enough space to the right of the sink for what is newly clean, and an empty sink. 

Generally this means making a pile on my island.

The sink, like my calendar, is now empty. Full of possibilities, not obligations.

I get a garbage bag, a compost bag, and a recycling box. I start to empty the fridge, the freezer, and my feelings into these bins. I sort and scrape the contents of the containers and dishes I find within. 

My dearest spinach
I wasn’t who you needed
Find them in the earth

I discover half my dishes and all of my glass containers are in the fridge (the other half are part of Anna’s dinnerware collection now). Now that my fridge has capacity – like my social energy – there is space to imagine what could fill the fridge and my life. 

Everyone has a method for washing the dishes. Some prefer two-bowl sinks, one with soapy water and one with “clean” rinsing water that never gets changed; sometimes the second bowl is empty with a running tap. Maybe you have a large single bowl with the tap running. Maybe you use a secondary bowl (an actual bowl) filled with soapy water – here dishes are scrubbed first, with the water off, then rinsed under running water.

Sometimes all you can do is chaotically wash the dishes you need right now overtop of the dirty dishes you made hours or days ago, hoping the soap from your empty shaker bottle will start soaking the caked on debris. Maybe if you add enough food scraps you’ll create a drain plug, since you can’t reach the one at the bottom of the sink anymore.

For the last 2 years my life has been a chaotic sink.

Part of the space I’m creating for myself is to connect my values to food through storytelling and recipes. With my newly empty sink and schedule, topics I’ve cared about since I took Eating Local and Sustainable Agriculture as electives in 2006 are taking over my mind. How can I talk about the individual choices we can make to reduce our environmental footprint, without creating guilt and shame for people? Why talk about individual choices when the solutions are systemic and industrial? If you’d like to find some hope that we can save our planet, Speed and Scale by John Doerr is excellent (the audiobook is great).

There are choices you can make. Dishwashers are the environmental choice: your dishwasher manual will tell you how much water it uses, but generally a dishwasher uses 10–15L of water. Most dishwashers have a built-in water heater that’s more energy efficient than your own. Mine reports to me in its app. I only used 10L of water today, beat that!

The average kitchen faucet will use 1 gallon – 4L – of water per minute. If you’re a fill-two-sink-bowls person, each bowl holds 20-30 liters of water, plus more for rinsing. This means you’ll use 40L of water or more to wash your dishes. You could run the dishwasher 4 times. Washing dishes by hand is one of those industry-created myths from the 90s that moved corporate responsibility onto individuals, like re-using yogurt containers (hello microplastics!), that I’m trying to move on from.

The most water efficient method to wash dishes by hand is listed in Peter Miller’s book on how to wash the dishes, astutely called How To Wash The Dishes. You have a bowl – ideally glass or stainless – filled with soap and hot water. This is home base for your sponge or dish cloth. You scrub and clean from home base. You rinse with clean running water at the end.

Thinking about water usage is important, but it’s also taking up space – making individuals argue with each other about how individual choices impact the planet instead of focusing on structural change. Here’s some data: US homes use around 90B gallons of water per year. California’s agriculture industry uses 34M acre feet of water per year, a number so large in gallons it’s written as 1.10789321e+13 gallons. 1 acre feet is 325,900 gallons. Almonds account for 17% of that water usage. So while you may feel guilt for leaving the faucet running because that’s how you learned to wash the dishes, perhaps we should stop growing almonds in the desert? That’s unrealistic – almonds are a huge economy, and protein source for the meatless world – so the better solution is to pair almonds with plants and animals that build water retention into the earth through regenerative farming and biodiversity. But that would lower profits and that isn’t The American Way. Individualism is.

I don’t like drying racks, so with my counters around the sink clear I set out a large floursack towel – 30” wide, organic cotton. I have 40 of these towels. I don’t use paper towel anymore – because once paper is bleached it can’t be composted. This is also true for wax paper and parchment. Paper towel has a huge carbon footprint due to its size in transportation. The paper industry will try to argue with FUD – fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They’ll say trees don’t need pesticides – according to The World Bank, non-organic cotton is responsible for 2.5% of global crops, but uses 16% of all global pesticide use? Individualism suggests that you should only buy organic cotton, though perhaps the Government should regulate pesticide use instead. But also, if you can afford it please only buy organic cotton and unbleached paper products.

I start washing the larger items first, baking sheets then pots and pans. I’ve found I can wash dishes until I run out of counter space and then I stop. Like working in tech, it’s hard to start again once you stop. You realize all the other things you could be doing.

Just keep scrubbing.

I Tetris the dishes like I used to Tetris my seventeen Zoom meetings per day. I don’t have space for you, can I wash this bowl tomorrow?

Just keep scrubbing.

Did you know that kitchen sponges are made of plastic, and some plastic don’t jive well with certain soaps? That’s why your sponge smells. Dan Pelosi did the research.

I’ve removed almost all the plastic from my kitchen, the sponge and plastic wrap are my last plastic habits to break. I’ll invest in dish cloths this year. The reason Anna has half my dishes is because I’ve started giving friends food on dinnerware and in glass containers. It’s my resistance against the plasticarchy. Forcing my friends to see the space my plate and Weck jar take up in their home. You don’t think about plastic because it’s in the landfill, not taking up space in your kitchen. My dinnerware is imposing its values on you.

It’s working. My friends now show up with their own plates, glass containers, and jars when they visit – knowing they will be leaving with food.

The key to cleaning dishes isn’t a great sponge, but great soap. You shouldn’t have to scrub like your life depends on it. It’s easy to think of all soaps as universally the same – as only a surfactant – surface active agents, the things that bubble. Surfactants are what kill bacteria and viruses and remove oils. But what makes a great kitchen soap is enzymes. Enzymes act like keys, unlocking the hand-cuffs on proteins so they can become smaller components that are easier to remove, like police breaking up a climate protest. Like police, some enzymes only take action on certain proteins, so you need to make sure your soap has a diverse set of enzymes if you want to actually clean your dishes. I use Mrs. Meyers, it smells nice, but more importantly it works well.

For stubborn issues you also want to use atomically sticky ingredients, like baking soda. The atoms of baking soda are subtly more attractive – at a molecular, not cosmetic level – to polymerized fat and starch molecules when compared to stainless steel molecules.

On occasion I need to use Barkeeper’s friend, which is oxalic acid. Allegedly this is a natural ingredient, but in high volumes it damages water ecosystems. I only use this when baking soda fails.

If you are struggling with congealed starch, fill the pot or pan with water and bring it to a boil. Leave it to cool, then scrub. The same works for sugars. You can also add some baking soda.

I always feel like the dishes take hours, but resetting the kitchen usually takes 15-30 minutes. Less time if I remember to clean as I go. But cleaning as you go is a habit that takes work, like self care, fitness, and eating broccoli. It’s hard to do when you feel like you have no space. Like doing a cleanse, sometimes you have to hit reset to feel like your new habits can be earned.

With the dishes clean I grab my handy bench scraper and scrape the counters and cooktop. You’d be surprised how much builds up in a day or two. Jam, coffee stains, caked on flour, a piece of dried onion. I used to fight this with a sponge, now the bench scraper removes it all in one sweep. I grab a small, clean cloth with just a bit of soap to clean the counters. Friends of mine insist on using the kitchen sponge to clean the counter – without soap – and I just see bacteria. If you use soap a sponge is fine, since soap does destroy the cell walls of bacteria. But just a wet sponge, that just cleaned the raw chicken bowl? No thank you. I will clean the counters again once they leave. With soap.

The cooktop needs to be cleaned. Mine is glass, I have induction – it uses clean energy, is more efficient, and cooks better than natural gas. But the glass surface can build up grease stains that make your cooktop look dirty and unappealing. These stains are polymerized oils from the high heat of your pan. You can buy the fancy ceramic cleaning paste, but it’s just liquid baking soda. Use your bench scraper to remove the big bits, then do a once-over with baking soda. It takes less than a minute.

I also used to buy oven cleaner. Now I use a glass scraper and baking soda.

Your aluminum baking sheets that look like they’re 20 years old? Baking soda.

Pots and pans have ugly brown-yellow streaks? Baking soda.

When you’re using baking soda, the trick is to make it into a paste with water and let it sit for 5 minutes, then scrub. If you add vinegar immediately you’ll get a great science experiment but poor cleaning results. Scrubbing before vinegar enables you to use the abrasive power of baking soda, like sending your aggressive aunt to complain to the manager. Adding vinegar too soon steals her thunder.

Don’t use baking soda on non-stick since it’s a mild abrasive which will expose you to the toxic plastic used to make pans non-stick. But it’s your individual choice to be exposed to toxic plastic forever chemicals, even though they could be regulated and replaced with non-toxic coatings, like silicone and ceramic.

You can use baking soda on glass, steel, aluminum, silicone, and ceramic. Don’t use baking soda on seasoned cast iron, wood, or sealed stone. It’s a mild abrasive and will scratch the surface finish. When you’re cleaning, the easy way to avoid scratches is to learn about relative hardness. Material hardness is a measurement you can Google. Emotional hardness doesn’t yet have such a scale. I’m working on lowering mine.

Ceramic can scratch glass. Glass can scratch metal. Metal can scratch wood. Nothing can scratch a diamond except for another diamond. I suppose lasers can scratch diamonds, but that’s really melting them with pizzazz. I would like to be a diamond.

I dry the dishes and put them away.

I now have space – a fully reset on the kitchen and my life. My imagination runs wild with how to use it. Maybe I can make croissants today? That will use up all of my space, but if I practice the habit of cleaning as I go perhaps it won’t be so bad.

When I had a startup, I always used to tell my team that “saying yes is saying no to something else.” It’s a method of acknowledging we can’t do everything, so we should be intentional about what we say yes to. My personal challenge this year is learning to keep space instead of taking on so much it overwhelms my capacity. Privately this means a slower pace, saying no to myself and others. Publicly this means keeping a content schedule that I can produce ahead of time and maybe finally going to Italy.

If you read this far, thank you and please consider a paid subscription if you want to support my work. Each subscription is a brick of cheese that I can crumble over spinach to pretend I’m healthy.

Marko