The $13 Solution That’ll Help Keep Your Kitchen Clean This Time of Year
Our kitchens are about to work the hardest they work all year, churning out potluck dishes to bring to gatherings, Christmas bark to wrap for teacher gifts, cinnamon rolls for cozy mornings, and all manner of pies, stuffings, and roasts. As the weather gets colder, we also turn to classic comfort foods. This means more frying things like bacon for hearty breakfasts and decadent meatballs for appetizers. Unfortunately, with all this cooking and hosting and eating comes a drastic escalation of a less beloved kitchen activity: cleanup.
I have a few best practices that make kitchen cleanup as efficient and painless as possible. As I’m baking or cooking, I try to have a paper towel or a damp rag handy to wipe up spills immediately, so I’m not scraping dried-up messes off the counters later. I also fill one side of my sink with hot, soapy water and drop dishes and cooking tools in there as soon as I’m done with them, again, to avoid having to face a pile of dishes with half-dried food gunk on them later.
When it’s time for after-eating cleanup, clearing the entire table off first, then doing the stovetop and counters, and tackling the dishes at the end makes the whole process less chaotic. Visually, the mess gets smaller and smaller, and that keeps up my morale.
The best kind of cleaning solution, however, is one that keeps messes from happening in the first place. Grease messes, in particular, are far better if they can be stopped before they start — because cleaning them sometimes seems to make a bigger mess than you started with! (Wiping with a rag can spread the grease around and it often takes a bit of time for even good grease busters to cut through.)
Related: Everything You Need to Know About Cleaning Grease in One Place
Enter: the grease splatter screen. It prevents all of this hassle and saves you precious time and energy in the kitchen. At just $13, this highly reviewed and easy-to-store cooking solution contains grease within the confines of the pan, keeping it from bespattering your stovetop, grates, backsplash, counters, walls, and all the tools you keep next to the stove. It’ll make your holiday cooking, and any frying you do after, a far less messy endeavor.
And yes, there are others on Amazon (including this one, which has an activated carbon filter in the screen to help absorb messes and prevent them from stinking up your house), but this one has earned the Amazon’s Choice badge and has more than 2,000 five-star reviews.
Do you use a splatter screen when you’re cooking something that could be messy?