Keeping your countertops clean while cooking requires a little bit of forethought, but nothing too complex! It’s all about how you rotate your 4 “core” towels.
Before we get into the details, the broad idea is that each of your core towels have a certain level of cleanliness, progressing from clean to messy (1-4).
As you use each towel, they’ll become dirtier and eventually no longer perform at their original level. When that happens, the towel is bumped to the following level.
If you can remember that, you've got the rest of this rotation in the (laundry) bag.
Now to the details: you’ll want to start with at least 4 clean towels. Ideally, you'll have several more than that, but 4 will do.
Purpose: The title says it all. Your Hand Towel is what you're using to wipe your hands on after you wash or rinse them. It's for very-clean hands only! You're going to want to keep this clean to the point where you wouldn't mind eating off of it. Very-clean hands only!
Location: I recommend tucking your Hand Towel into whatever you're wearing so it's always physically on you. Consider keeping it next to your non-dominant hand. I find this makes it less likely I'll be on auto-pilot and smear it with Sauce as I’m stirring away.
Some will prefer to keep this on the counter, hanging from an oven pull, or looped around a fridge handle. Wherever you store it, make sure your Hand Towel stays as clean as possible and separate from the others.
Purpose: The Cleanish Towel is one of my favorite tools for fast, clean cooking. It allows you to skip the extra fuss when you just need to wipe something small off your hands, wipe down a Vinegar bottle, or clean out residual Garlic Powder from a teaspoon. This is the towel that's going to make dishes so much more manageable—you're gonna love it.
Location: I like to keep my Cleanish Towel on my person as well, next to my dominant hand. You can also keep this towel on the counter next to where you're doing all your measuring, chopping, mixing, etc.
Usage: When you don't want to get to the sink and wash your hands or rinse a mildly dirtied dish, use your Cleanish Towel instead. It can also be used to wipe off tiny pieces of produce that stick to your cutting board. It might help to think of it as a spot cleaner—taking care of small messes along the way.
Don't clean up spills with your Cleanish Towel (or get it covered in Syrup!)
Remember, keep it relatively clean. Your Cleanish Towel is just for getting ingredients off of your hands and tools, not a full-blown clean-up towel. That's next.
Purpose: ~This~ is your clean-up towel. Instead of getting absolutely swamped by the chaos of cluttered counters, use a Mess Towel to clean up any spills, splashes, and splatters as they happen.
Location: Keep it on the counter next to wherever you're cooking or prepping.
Usage: When spills happen—which, they will—use your Mess Towel to clean up the bulk of the food. It’s here to round up spilled Grains, knocked-over Spices, splatters from transferring spoon to spoon-rest, and any other surprises.
It might get a little wet here and there, depending on the mess, but it should be kept mostly dry. After you use your Mess Towel: go wash your hands, dry them on your clean Hand Towel, and keep on cooking!
Purpose: The Damp Towel is the towel you, well, keep damp. You use the Damp Towel to finish the job of your Mess Towel, as needed.
The relationship between these two towels is arguably the most important, as it helps make cleaning far less frustrating. When you start with a dry towel to clean up the bulk of a spill, it allows the damp towel to do its job—get rid of any sticky, tacky, residual foodstuff.
Location: Keep this one on the countertop or next to the sink for easy rinsing.
Usage: Don’t keep your Damp Towel excessively wet. It shouldn’t drip at all. Wring out before using to avoid drenched countertops. I usually add a drop of dish soap when working with heavily pigmented foods like Beets and Turmeric or Oily foods, but sometimes I'll add soap just because I feel like it. What can I say—I like to live a little!
It's pretty much inevitable that one of these towels is gonna get wrecked—if not over time, then accidentally. (Again, this is why it's helpful to have more than 4 towels available).
So how does the towel rotation go again?
Fresh Towel → Hand Towel
Hand Towel → Cleanish Towel
Cleanish Towel → Mess Towel
Mess Towel → Damp Towel
When one towel gets dirty, move it down the chain until it accumulates too much yuck to continue using. Then, give it a good rinse and designate it as an additional Damp Towel until you're done cooking.
Sometimes I'll wind up having two or three damp towels by end of my cooking process. Sometimes I'll still be using my originals. It really changes from day to day.
Any amount of used towels at the end is just fine, so use however many you need!
I think a classic "cotton dish towel" can work well for your Hand Towel and Cleanish Towel, though I recommend investing in something like a washcloth for these purposes—especially for the Mess and Damp Towels.
The size and texture of a washcloth will be much easier to clean with, in general, which is why I use them for all my cooking. The ones I use are the ones I'm modeling in the top image of this post.
You can often purchase cleaning washcloths in bulk—the ones we used at my housecleaning job were from IKEA. I really like them, as they can withstand frequent washing, without degrading in quality.
If you made it this far, congrats!
Cleaning while you cook is an incredibly helpful skill to learn. Despite its importance, this skill is not often taught explicitly—something I find both strange and telling.
Like many other care tasks, cleaning and cooking are processes that many people assume we just “know” how to do. That’s just not true. Care tasks are things we learn from others and strengthen through practice.
If we’re never taught the basics of cleaning while we cook, how are we supposed to know that it makes things easier?
I strongly feel these skills are really worth being taught, especially because people with ADHD struggle with care tasks in general. They are harder for us to learn and harder for us to maintain.
So, I hope you find that this cleaning method works for you. Or if it doesn’t, then I hope you find something else that helps keep the mess at bay when you’re bopping about in your kitchen, because keeping countertops clear of clutter will genuinely make cooking *far* more enjoyable. I promise!
