We are. . . I’ll call it lazy, because it is, and are pretty bad about unloading the dishwasher when it finishes, so we often grab plates/bowls/cups/utensils from there throughout the day to eat with.
Dirty dishes initially arrive in right-hand quadrant of the sink for a light rinse to get off any substantial gunk but not a deep cleanse or anything. Like when gf uses a knife for peanut butter – I ain’t wait a huge wad of sticky pb attracting bugs for two or three days.
After the light rinse (usually done after each meal-cycle or at least twice a day), things are roughly stacked up into the left-hand sink in this semi-clean state. Plates bottom, bowls next, cups, mugs, and utensils scattered around.
By a couple of days, we’re running low on dishes, or I need to cook something that involves raw meat (and thus lots of sanitizing handwashing to be done, which I don’t wanna do over dishes for reasons to become clear momentarily). At which point I ask the gf to empty out the very last of the stuff in the dishwasher.
I load up all the dishwasher-able stuff – the heavy duty plates, plastic cups, coffee mugs, silverware, plastic cutting board if I used it (always cut meat on there, disinfect in the empty sink with spray cleaner, then rinse and into the dishwasher with it), tupperware, etc.
That leaves a sink full of handwashing stuff – pots and pans, good knives, fragile glasses I don’t want knockin’ around like wine glasses and cocktail stuff, that kinda thing. I wash all this by hand and toss it in the rack to dry. Handwashing for me is, sadly, running water, pick up each item, quick pass under the faucet to get it wet, scrub with a soapy sponge (Dawn gang represent), rinse immediately.
And it’s this stuff I get leery about being the sink for raw-meat-time. Like, a steel knife, I’m pretty sure I’m cleaning well. But I worry about a spatter of chicken gunk flying off onto a wine glass or one of my gf’s vacuum seal travel coffee mugs that I don’t generally wash super super vigorously. So, always try to get the sink totally empty before starting raw meat stuff (e.g., the aforementioned plastic cutting board wouldn’t go in before the sink-emptying-via-loading-dishwasher-and-handwashing-vulnerables cycle).
The dishwasher runs with the fancy high end platinum whatever whatever pods and does fine despite being ancient and noisy as all fuck. I kinda look forward to it dying so we can replace it with something that doesn’t take two hours and wake the dead in the process.
But, I do trust it to disinfect well and thoroughly with the right cycle setup. I still pre-treat that meat-y cutting board with Fantastik, though, hah.
