Clean dishes with little fuss

In order to reduce the amount of dishes you need to wash you might consider buying and storing more paper products. It will save time and stress in a true emergency and you won’t have to wash those dishes in dirty water!

However, even with paper products, you will still have pots, pans, serving spoons, etc that will need to be cleaned.

Scrape off all the excess food from your dishes to dispose off before washing.

Dishes are particularly important to keep clean because we eat off of them. If they are dirty, what we’re eating is not necessarily safe. Sometimes, though, the source of contamination comes from water.

If you are doing dishes in water that has contaminants, you’ll need to kill the bacteria so they don’t make you sick. Here’s how you kill those bad bacteria:

Get a pot of water on to boil and get it hot. You want that water at a rolling boil. If the water is particularly suspect, you may want to leave it boiling for 5 minutes or so.

When you are happy with the boil on your water, fill your dish pan half way up with boiling water. Dilute with cold to get it to a temperature you can put your hands into. Here’s the most important thing: THIS SHOULD BE AS HOT AS POSSIBLE. Nearly-scald-your-hands-when-you-put-them- in kinda hot, as it will have some time to cool down while you are doing the next step. Put some soap in this water, and then put your pot back on to boil with more water.

When the second pot of water is boiling, move it over into your dish line – this is your rinse water. If you use the pot as the rinse pan, you can eliminate bringing along another piece of equipment. Remember, you want the water disgustingly, awfully hot. Here’s the big warning: Don’t burn yourself.

• Wash the dishes in the mildly cooler water.

• Rinse in the hot.

• Put out to dry.

Once your dishes are done, remember that this water can also be re-used, either in your toilet or to water your plants.