Deep Clean Your Kitchen

If you’re taking online cooking courses, it’s a safe bet that your kitchen is your happy place. It’s where you feel the most creative, always mixing and matching your favorite ingredients into new and exciting dishes. As with any area that’s used a lot, your kitchen takes a little bit of a beating and needs to be deep cleaned on occasion. In addition to a pristine kitchen just being a more pleasant place to spend your time rather than a dirty one, it’s also important to keep it clean because you prepare food there. You don’t have a health inspector stopping by your home kitchen to make sure it’s a safe place for food, so you need to make sure it’s safe yourself. And you do have a health inspector stopping by your work kitchen, so you want to make sure it passes the inspection. Here’s the first in a two-part series about how to make your kitchen shine:

Clean the kitchen itself:
Before starting on your appliances, clean the kitchen itself. Wipe down your walls, counters and cabinets with a cloth sprayed with all-purpose cleaner. Sweep and vacuum your floors, getting the crumbs from underneath your table, fridge and stove and alongside the edges of the counters. Shake out your kitchen mats outside, and then finish the floors with a mop job.

Clean your sink:
Put an even layer of baking soda in your sink and scrub with a wet sponge or toothbrush. If there’s still a greasy film left, top it off with a few spritzes of degreaser. Your garbage disposal has probably been neglected for a while. After all, you throw old food down it, why would it have to be cleaned? If you’ve ever noticed a funky smell permeating from your disposal, that’s why you should clean it regularly.

According to Apartment Therapy, you can effectively clean your disposal with household items. Put a half cup of baking soda down the drain and add a cup of white vinegar. Let this fizz for a few minutes and pour some boiling water down the sink after it. Then let the disposal run with two cups of ice and salt in there, with the water running. Finish it up while running a lemon or a lime through the disposal to deodorize it.

Clean your dishwasher:
You ask why you would clean your dishwasher? It does the washing, right? Well, it washes your dishes. The washer itself has to deal with lime deposits and food stains, which can get pretty gross. Put a bit of lemonade flavored Kool-Aid in the soap container and run the empty dishwasher on a cycle. The citric acid will get rid of anything stuck to the dishwasher.