Spring Cleaning

Most of the time when spring rolls around, I get spring cleaning fever. I feel the insatiable urge to clean and scour every bit of my house. That lasts until it wears off. I make a decent dent in my to-do list and leave the rest for when the next bug strikes.

Joel sent me an article from the New York Times today on how to get your dishwasher to be more effective. The gist of it is to let your dishwasher do more of the work....leaving me more time to dust the blinds I never seem to get to. The idea of the article is that with rinsing and scrubbing beforehand we aren't leaving a lot for our dishwasher to do...and thereby propagating the ugly cloudy spots on our glasses known as etching.

Last night I had a particularly beastly set of dishes to wash. They were a day old...remnants from a dinner party the night before (shout out here to the lovely Forsbergs). After reading this article, I decided to give not scrubbing a try. I threw away large pieces of food and for the most part loaded a helter skelter.

The result?

Tonight upon unloading, nary a bit of food or a cloudy dish. Hmnmm. I think my favorite part of the article was the last little bit suggesting that we open our dishwasher door during the last five minutes of the cycle to allow the hot air to evaporate rather than sit on the dishes to prevent streaking and/or spotting. But how to time those last five minutes...my dishwasher doesn't exactly come with a count down. Ah well.

What is your latest kitchen cleaning tip?