Licking Your Plate Clean

Before Bill Bixby played the mild-mannered alter-ego of The Incredible Hulk and after he played the mild-mannered earthling in My Favorite Martian, he played a mild-mannered single dad in "The Courtship of Eddie's Father."



Despite the premise that seemed absurd even to a 10 year-old, I watched the first of Bixby's TV series because Martin the Martian was played by Ray Walston, who played the devil in my favorite movie at the time, "Damn Yankees." But I watched the second series because I liked Bixby.

In a long forgotten episode from that long forgotten series, a confirmed bachelor friend of Eddie's Father tells him that now that he's a bachelor, he has to start cooking differently.  He proceeds to pull a head of lettuce and some salad dressing from the refrigerator, break off a hunk of leaves and quickly rinse it under the kitchen faucet.  Then, he pours salad dressing over the lettuce in his hand and chomps into the drippy mess as he holds it over the sink.  "Bachelor salad."

Not the way to clean your dishes.

These days, Carl's Jr takes some scantilly clad beauty and lets her drip a luscious burger as she takes a bite to entice bachelors to buy fast food.  It's unclear if young women believe they can eat those Six Dollar Burgers regularly and, because we are what we eat, look like Miss Turkey, but the ads must be effective at selling burgers as slop, because they keep running variations of it.

If you eat fast food at every meal, however, you'll most likely pack on some unwanted pounds (although that doesn't have to be the case), but more to the point of this blog, you'll generate a lot of trash, especially if you bring it home. If your trash receptacle is overflowing with take-out containers, you may think you saved yourself the trouble of doing dishes, but you have made a mess nonetheless.

As I've tried to show, cooking at home doesn't have to be messy. I will cop to having eaten the occasional "bachelor salad" or equivalent, but mostly I prefer to use plates and silverware.  Paper plates are too flimsy and can make more mess than they're worth, and plastic forks and knives just don't cut it.

We've talked about keeping the cooking dishes and pans down to a minimum, but what do you do about the plates and silverware?

Too many people pile stuff in the sink.  If you have roommates, this is a particularly big problem, as roommates may see no point in cleaning someone else's mess just to make way to clean up their own.  However, if you are the one who takes the initiative to be clean, everyone will love you and possibly even emulate your habits.

Regardless of whether it is overflowing trashcans or dirty dishes in the sink, they can attract cockroaches, ants and even rats.

Anne Hathaway's Cottage near Stratford Upon Avon.

The solution in Shakespeare's day was to lick your wooden plate clean, and then turn it over for the next day's meal, or at least that's what our guide told us at Anne Hathaway's Cottage.

While it is true that remnants of neither bacon nor eggs remain on either Julie or my plates after breakfast, I don't consider "licked clean" to be sufficient, even if that is done by humans rather than animal friends who delight in our leftovers.

The easiest way to handle dishes is to clean them as soon as you've used them, and even if you have a dishwasher, do your best to get all traces of food off.  I used to use a sponge, but Julie pointed out that a wet sponge seems ripe with bacteria to her, so I mostly use paper towels and a bit of dish soap with warm water, and that is more than sufficent without much scrubbing if I clean them immediately.  I still dutifully stick them in the dishwasher, which I run as more or less a disinfectant, I supppose.  Some dishwashers have the power to scrub not only dishes and forks but pots and pans, but I don't rely on that, especially if you don't know when you will run the dishwasher.  And it really is so easy to get dinnerware clean if you do so right after you finish eating that there is no point in leaving a mess for later.  The energy required will be less if done immediately, which is reason enough to skp procrastinating.



The old family farmhouse.

Compared to the chore it would have been to clean dishes on a farm without hot and cold running water, as it was in the farmhouse where my mother grew up, where vigorous pump action was required to just get cold well-water running weakly down a spout into the sink, washing dishes is a breeze.

While I'm thinking about it, most kitchens now have garbage disposals, which grind up food wastes that are rinsed off plates, but these are not intended to be a place for dumping big hunks of food. All that stuff must make it through your pipes, and the more junk you throw down there, the more chance you will stop it up, which creates a dirty job for you or an expensive plumber.