I had my very first request for a blog post from a fan :). Thanks, Dan, for making me feel famous.

He was right though, I left you all hanging. I told you about Brad and all of his kitchen rules and then all I gave you was a story about keeping your hands clean. People have heard about wet hand, dry hand. You need the chef’s wife inside kitchen rules. The ones nobody even knows exist.

So here is kitchen rule #2.

Never Leave a Dish in the Sink with Water In It

I call this soaking. Brad calls this gross.

I think I developed this habit to justify not doing my dishes right away. You fill a used pot with water and all that food and sauce still stuck in there get to slowly dissolve so dishes are so easy to clean whenever you get to them! Genius!

Especially when it comes to bowls of oatmeal. You don’t soak that bowl with a teeny bit of oatmeal left on it? It sticks like cement. You need a Brillo Pad to get that stuff off.

Shoulda soaked that bowl.

I seriously never noticed (or thought it was a big deal) that I did this until about a year ago when I was once again making fun of Brad for how he put dishes in the dishwasher. Bowls and glasses everywhere. In every direction. We could barely fit a days worth of dishes in there and there was no way they were ever going to get clean. It was my dad in me coming out when I asked him, once again, to put the big white bowls on the bottom shelf. All facing the same way. Pretty, pretty please.

“Alright fine. I will do that if you promise not to leave pots in the sink with water in them.”

WHAT?!?!?

This, my friends, is one of the secrets to marriage, right? Compromise. I get the bowls, he gets the water in the pots. And I don’t even really leave water in pots. That’s crazy. Who does that?

One point for Kels.

“Deal.”

Except the next couple of weeks I stopped myself from filling up pots, pans, bowls and dishes like 767868755 times. Turns out, I had a serious soaking problem.

Brad realized how hard this was for me and even cut me a little slack. Apparently it is ok to leave dishes in the sink (for a short period of time), as long as there is no water in them. But it turned out he doubly won this compromise because every time I’d fill up the stupid pot with water, I would realize what I was doing and then just wash it to get it out of my sight.

Stupid Pot Soaking Addiction.

I have to tell you all, I have not completely broken the habit. I actually chose to tell you about this rule next because the night I had a request for another kitchen rule, I was making burgers for Brad who had worked another 14 hour day. As I was frying up some bacon, I caught this little guy in the sink…

So Brad is doing much better with my kitchen rule than I am with his. But he’s a professional. I would expect nothing less from him. Brad invented the kitchen rules. I’m still a rookie in this game.