Thanks For Cooking, I’ll Do The Dishes

Wow, you two are terrific hosts. Thanks for having me at your cottage for the weekend and for the delicious welcome dinner. Please, let me clean up and do the dishes. No dishwasher? No problem! All I need is a sink to plug and a touch of dish soap.

 

No, no, I insist. Doing the dishes is the least I can do to help. Look, I’ve already plugged the sink and it’ll be full of water in no time. Pish posh, pre-rinsing is for people before they swim in public pools. Speaking of pools… it’s a pool party for the dishes! No time to scrape off food remnants, everybody in! 

 

You can put away that fancy, highfalutin’ dish soap. Save it for the next time you’re rescuing baby ducks from an oil spill. I found some of this yellow dish soap underneath the sink. You didn’t even know you had this kind of soap? I don’t know how you missed it, it was tucked at the back next to the rusty can of Ajax. Who needs “ultra” or “platinum” when you have “lemon fresh”? All you need is a couple of drops. 

 

What do you mean, where are the bubbles? Sheesh, mister excessive over here, “Use so much dish soap that there are bubbles.” Relax, my grandma washed her dishes this way and she lived to be 98 years old. It’s a shame she had all of those gastrointestinal issues. I don’t care what her doctor said, Gam Gam’s GI problems and her dishwashing were totally unrelated.

 

Is that the tray you used to transport the raw chicken to the barbeque? Plop it in! That tray is getting an all expenses paid trip to Helsinki. Don’t worry about germs, the hot water will kill most of the bacteria. No hot water at the cottage? No problem-o, the dish soap will do the heavy lifting. 

 

Salmonella? Come on, everyone knows you can only get that from salmon.

 

Please, no need for that sponge or scouring pad. I’ll just use this handy dandy dish rag to give everything a solid scrub-a-roo. Truth be told, it’s actually more of a Karate Kid-style wax on motion which doesn’t involve much force at all. It’s all about speed and efficiency of movement when it comes to doing the dishes.

 

When I’m done with these dishes, they’ll be so clean you could eat off of them. Haha, get it? Eat off of them! I gotta remember that one.

 

See, everything sitting in the sink all at once gives the caked on food a chance to loosen up and fall off. Well, you can’t really see anything below the surface because the water has gotten a little murky. 

 

When the sink starts to look like a witch’s cauldron with bits and pieces of food floating around, that’s how you know it’s time to pull things out and put them on the drying rack. Hey, a drumstick!

 

Trust me, these dishes are plenty clean. Back in the 1700s entire families bathed this way to conserve water and, if my history is correct, those families were as clean as an ox. Of course that’s a real expression.

 

Where do you two think you are going? You’re not getting out of drying duty that easily. Grab a couple of towels and get cracking. Remember: whatever didn’t come off during the washing is the responsibility of the dryer. Some of the food is really stuck on there, so you might need to use a little extra muscle. It’s like Ice-Cube said, “You can do it, put your back into it.” 

 

Hmm, looks like the sink is having a bit of trouble draining. Probably wouldn’t have been an issue if – I’m not going to name names – a couple of people had eaten all of the food on their plates. Give the drain a little time to digest, but you might want to call a plumber if it hasn’t unclogged itself by morning.

 

Speaking of morning, I hope you two don’t like to sleep in at the cottage. I’m an early riser and I like breakfast served first thing. Don’t worry, you cook and I’ll do the dishes.