Habits For a Well-Run Kitchen

In my early years of motherhood, my kitchen was always a mess. I would inwardly cringe if someone showed up at my house unexpectedly and saw my kitchen in its normal, middle-of-the-day mess. Because the reality was that my middle-of-the-day mess looked more like a college boy’s “I haven’t cleaned my apartment for a week” kind of mess. There were always piles of dirty dishes, my counters were covered with anything from cereal boxes left out after breakfast to a whole menagerie of kitchen gadgets and appliances that “obviously” had to be stored on the counter (probably because my cabinets were too overflowing with other things I didn’t need and didn’t use). I would complain that I didn’t have room in my kitchen to cook anything, there wasn’t enough counter space or the kitchen was too small. So what changed? It all started when I got serious about decluttering my house. I realized how amazing my kitchen felt after a decluttering session. I would be excited to cook in it for the next 24 hours, then I would experience the same old feeling of walking into a disaster of a kitchen and deciding it was easier to go pick up McDonalds for dinner instead. 

Then one day it occurred to me that maybe taking care of my kitchen was a little bit like a mini-decluttering session that happens everyday. What if I could use habits to make my kitchen feel like a newly decluttered room every single day? To the naturally clean person, this sounds silly. I have a sister-in-law who is amazing at taking care of her house. We spent lots of time with her and her family in the early days of our marriage, and I remember being so surprised as a young wife when I would walk in her kitchen in the middle of the day and see no dirty dishes on her counter. I honestly didn’t know that there were people who loaded their dishwashers throughout the day 🙃. Fast forward twelve years, and I understand now why she managed to keep a tidy, peaceful kitchen all day: when my kitchen’s peaceful, so am I. If that sounds dramatic, I would challenge you to start paying attention to how you feel when your kitchen’s out of control versus organized and tidy. Have you ever walked into a messy kitchen and immediately felt cranky? Or do you find yourself eating out way more than you should? I’m willing to bet the culprit is a messy and/or cluttered kitchen.

The good news that I’ve found is that there’s only a few REALLY SIMPLE habits that are needed to keep your kitchen calm. I will warn you that these habits are best implemented in a decluttered kitchen; I never had success with them until I got rid of the excess in my kitchen. And again, if you’re the person this comes naturally to, that’s great! But if you struggle in this area, I hope these habits will help. Sometimes we just need someone to look at us and just say “just do this, it works.” Once you get started, you can always add more if you need to, but I’m guessing these will have more of an impact than you imagine. Okay, here we go!

1. Wash your dishes after every meal. Up until we moved to our current house, I just made sure the dishes were done at some point everyday. I think that can be a great strategy for families who are gone from home all day, but it honestly wasn’t enough for us. We are a homeschooling family and are blessed that my husband can come home for lunch most days, so we pretty much eat three meals plus snacks together every single day. And since I try to cook from scratch in order to save money, we end up making A LOT of dishes. So when we moved to our current house (with no dishwasher), I knew I needed to do dishes more often than once a day. And it’s been the best thing I’ve ever done in my kitchen! The dishes from one meal take approximately two minutes to wash, maybe five if it’s a big meal like dinner. The dishes from an entire day? This somehow turns into an hour’s worth! Honestly, even if we are eventually blessed enough to have a dishwasher again, I will still do this, at least loading them in the dishwasher for later. Also a decluttering tip that helps with this: get rid of “multiples.” When you only have one set of measuring cups, you are forced to wash them before cooking something else. You’re still doing the same amount of dishes, but not all at one time.

2. The kitchen counters aren’t storage. This is more of a rule, but it’s one I check in with daily which makes it a habit. You can have the biggest kitchen known to mankind, but if you cover your counters with appliances and storage, it will feel like the smallest kitchen in the world. My rule is that I have to use it daily in order for it to deserve a spot on my counter. This means my coffee maker stays out, a jar of cooking utensils doesn’t. And yes, this applies to big appliances, too. I store both my oversized Kitchen Aid mixer AND my double drawer air fryer in kitchen cabinets. They are sometimes heavy and awkward to get out, but it’s worth it to have the extra counter space when they’re not in use. Plus, you get a mini workout everytime you bake cookies! Also, if other members of your household (cough, cough, husbands 😉) like to store things un-food-related on the counters, give them a designated area, like a basket or tray. Setting a boundary around areas where random things accumulate helps it be less messy and keeps the mess from spreading.

3. Clean out your fridge before putting groceries away. This is probably the only habit on this list I’ve been doing pretty much for my entire marriage. It’s so much easier to throw things away BEFORE putting the new groceries in. And if you are wanting to lower your grocery budget, this is the first place to start. It doesn’t matter if you buy bulk from a big box store or shop ten different stores for the best deals if you’re throwing away gobs of food each week. If you’re throwing away lots of leftovers every week, either make a better plan to actually eat them, or stop making so much at mealtimes. If you’re wasting produce, then buy fruit your kids actually like (for me this means strawberries instead of kiwi) and frozen veggies. Please know I say this with all love, but if the fresh produce ended up in the trash then it wasn’t actually healthy for you. Better to buy frozen veggies that actually get eaten than fresh ones that don’t.

4. Meal prep in small pockets of time. What is it about an Instagram shot of a fridge full of matching meal prep containers that makes us go crazy thinking we need to do these five-hour long meal prep sessions? I know, I’ve been there before, too. I’m going to caution you against this, though, for two reasons: 1) there’s a good chance some of that food you prepped is going to go bad before you eat it (I generally plan to use food within four days of prepping/cooking it) or it’s going to get eaten too quickly (so for instance, I will bake cookies the day after getting groceries, then make a different snack a few days later, that way they don’t all get eaten at once). 2) Most of us don’t have five-hour chunks of time for meal prepping. When I tell myself I’m going to wait until I can do my whole meal prep list at once, I inevitably don’t get it done. But I can always find a few minutes in my day to do something. I keep a list on my phone of what needs to be prepped each week and work through it as I have time. This includes everything from meat that needs to be thawed, fruit that needs washed and/or cut up, and actual recipes that need to be made, like cookies for snacks or something I want to cook ahead of time for breakfast. Nothing is too small of a task to go on your meal prep list. Kendra Adachi, author of The Lazy Genius Way, says when her kids were little she would do things like fill a pot with water and set it on the stove so that it was ready to boil noodles for spaghetti. That’s a crazy easy task, but any mom of littles knows that it simplifies dinner prep when you are going to be holding a little one while cooking. 

Again, none of these four things are life-changing at first glance, but I am confident if you begin doing them, your kitchen will feel like a completely different place. If you feel like your kitchen is in total chaos, start with a good decluttering session and then do your dishes at least every day, if not after each meal. Then you can add the other habits as you’re ready. Remember, peaceful kitchens = peaceful mamas!