Whisks can be tough to clean. All those skinny tines are great for emulsifying a vinaigrette or beating eggs whites, but they create lots of hard-to-reach spots to clean later. And especially when you’re cooking with bacteria-prone foods (like eggs!) or clingy, oily ones (like olive oil!), you really want to make sure your whisk gets thoroughly cleaned. I’ve spent a fair amount of time wedging soapy sponges between the tines, trying to clean each one off individually.

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As you may already know, I love perusing Airbnb as much for the decorating and organizing ideas as I do to actually book a trip! I’m consistently impressed at how the rental property owners have all the necessary items to make sure you’re comfortable and have everything you need — without jamming the drawers in a way that makes you feel just a little bit weird about being in someone else’s home.

Most of us have our kitchen cleaning routines down — which surfaces to scrub, where to sweep, how often to trade out our sponges, and all the rest. Once you get into the habit of the things you clean daily or weekly or seasonally, you’re pretty much set. Or so I thought until recently, when I came upon something I’d just never thought to clean. It came to me while I was baking lasagna.

Buying your first home is an exciting and arcane process — I know, because we just did it! Especially if you’re coming from an apartment or a rental, the ins and outs of taking care of your own space can be, well, all new. The room where this may be most evident? In the kitchen, where all those appliances, plumbing, and storage issues come together to create a zone that’s more prone to needing work than other, less-complicated rooms in the home.

Continuing the love-fest for all things British, we reached out to our Brit friends to see what kitchen brands we may be missing out on. Fortunately, thanks to the wonders of the world wide web and international shipping, most British and European brands are fairly accessible Stateside. But there are a few that are pretty rare over here. Here are the five brands that came up the most in our informal poll.

My favorite way to use Airbnb has nothing to with actually booking trips: I just like to peek into people’s perfectly styled homes and see how people live. You can almost always get a good idea or three just from looking at photos. Here are seven organizing tricks we learned during a recent trip through some British Airbnbs. Open shelves full of food packaging look messy — but put dry goods into containers (either glass or opaque) and, all of a sudden, they become artful.

Moving is a pain in the butt. Whether you’re going full DIY (packing yourself up, renting the van, and loading and unloading yourself) or hiring people to do the (literal) heavy lifting, a ton of work goes into it. Especially when it comes to kitchenware: A lot of the stuff in there is bitty, spill-y, poke-y, oddly shaped, and generally tough to move. Plus, no one wants to spend a lot of money on packing materials that you just throw away (or pass along) at the end of your move.

Making your own pasta might be one of the most rewarding things you can DIY instead of buy. My sister and her husband do it, and man — there is a difference between what they make and what I bring home in a box from the store! But if you have a KitchenAid pasta attachment, you know how important it is to keep it clean. And that you’re definitely not supposed to soak the attachment in water or run it through the dishwasher!

Just about all of our small appliances work with electricity, which means: cords! And the slow cooker is no exception. More than other occasional-use appliances, you want to be careful with your slow cooker’s power cords. Why? Because you leave it going for hours on end — I mean, the whole point is to set it and forget it! And many of us start something in the slow cooker before work and leave it doing its thing all day, by itself, in the house.

The dishwasher is a wonderful thing. It’s so nice to load those crusty dinner plates and utensils into the dishwasher and let them come out the next morning, magically squeaky-clean. I don’t even rinse them anymore! And that combination of detergent and super-hot water makes me feel confident that my dishes are coming out about as sanitary as they possibly can — even cleaner than if I washed them myself! Love that.

Do you already think that chicken juice is the grossest? If not, let me tell you why it is: Raw chicken, and the juice it produces, can harbor bacteria like mpylobacter, Salmonella, and Clostridium perfringens, which can cause uncomfortable foodborne illnesses and, in rare cases, death.

Getting the kitchen organized is an ongoing struggle for most of us. Whether it’s a lack of space, too much stuff, or systems that aren’t working for whatever reason, it’s easy for those kitchen tools and pantry items to get out of control. We pretty much all need help! So we asked you, our wonderful readers, what organizing tools have helped you out the most. Here’s what you told us. See all the responses on Instagram.

Spring cleaning is an annual ritual you almost can’t help but partake in — even if you have no intention of doing it, all it takes is a friend talking about their big decluttering project to spark the clean-out bug and all of sudden you’re filling a box with donation items! Because everyone has different priorities when it comes to cleaning, we polled you, our readers, to see what was on your spring cleaning list.

Even though chicken is one of the healthiest and most popular of proteins, it can skeeve people out. That’s because raw chicken can carry various bacteria, including the familiar Salmonella and less-familiar Campylobacter and Clostridium perfringens.

When those first brighter rays of sunshine start filtering through the (albeit dirty!) kitchen windows, all of a sudden you really start to see the dust that’s been accumulating on the baseboards, the grease around the cupboard knobs, the dirt caked into your grout, and the grime in the crevices of your appliances. This is the time to break out your full arsenal of oddly shaped and repurposed brushes (a toothbrush is always a favorite) and DIY cleansers and get to work.

Company’s coming! Now! Whether you’re hosting book club, having your in-laws over for a special celebration, or throwing a full-on party, having guests over is a good reason for many of us to fly into a full-fledged cleaning frenzy. And if you’re like me, that cleaning frenzy often turns into hyper-focusing on all the things that are messy and dirty in the house (which turns into, let’s be honest, wasting time cleaning things that no one cares about).

Whether you’re a professional chef in a restaurant or a home cook who spends hours prepping, cooking, and cleaning, a kitchen mat can be a godsend to keep your body from feeling the aches and pains associated with standing for hours. But as you can imagine, kitchen mats get filthy! Spills from food, dishwater, and heavy traffic can quickly mar the surface.

We talked to someone at SimpleHuman to find out.

According to 2016 stats from the EPA, the average American produces about 4.4 pounds of trash a day, and the average family of four produces 17.4 pounds. At first it was a surprise to me that kids create just as much waste as adults do, but then I remembered all the diapers, single-serve applesauce packets, and “art” they bring home from school … the kids may be worse than I am!

The outside of our Dutch ovens can take a beating. That’s where food goes when it bubbles over or splatters — and then it bakes on hard. And let’s say you accidentally left your Le Creuset on the stove a little too long (who, you?) and now there are brown scorch marks on the bottom and/or side. Ugh, don’t worry — you haven’t ruined a $300 piece of cookware. You just need to be gentle (no steel wool!) and grab the baking soda.

Whether you’re throwing a party that gets a little rowdy or have a mishap while eating dinner in front of the television, every once in a while food is gonna drop on the couch. Unless you have the whole thing slipcovered in something you can pull off and throw into the washing machine, it can be tricky to remove stains thoroughly without getting water spots on the sofa.

As much as we all love cookbooks, sometimes you hit a point where you just have to let a few go. But unless a cookbook is totally trashed or something flimsy you put together in grade school, you don’t really want to just throw them in the garbage. Someone else could get use out of them! Here’s what to do with cookbooks you don’t want anymore.

Like most books, cookbooks are hard to part with. They can carry the sentimental weight of recipes you’ve loved, or dreams of the sort of cook you hoped to become, or the disappointment of diets failed, or meals that turned disastrous. But the reality is that most of us have only so much storage space for cookbooks, and at some point you may have to pare down.

While it’s not exactly hygienic to have your pets help with food prep, most cat and dog owners know the truth: It’s inevitable they will end up in the kitchen. Whether your pet’s in there to beg for food, demand attention, or judge your knife skills, it’s hard to keep those roving tongues at bay! Here are some of the weirdest, silliest, most disgusting things we let our pets do in the kitchen, according to a recent Facebook poll.

Doing the dishes falls somewhere between death and taxes in the realm of life’s certainties: Whether you’re eating cereal out of a bowl or making a gourmet meal, someone’s going to have to clean those dishes up! So the real question is, does it have to be such a slog? We reached out to our readers on Facebook to get their best tricks for doing the dishes faster and making the process easier — here’s what you suggested. “Clean as you go.

In my family, everything happens in the kitchen: work, bill paying, meal planning, arts and crafts, homework, evening gardening. Oh, right — and cooking and dining, too. Even though those are the main purposes of the space, so much other gear can creep into the kitchen it seems like sometimes there’s no space at the kitchen table to eat, or on the kitchen counter to prep food!

I’m a huge fan of my Dutch oven. I break it out so often in the wintertime for hearty foods like delicious stews and braised meats that by the end of the season it’s ready to hibernate! And every once in a while I abuse the poor thing by making something without enough liquid, or leaving it on the stove for so long that I end up with burnt bits everywhere.

With everyone headed to PyeongChang for the Olympics, we thought we’d check out some local Airbnb spaces. Because many of the most popular Korean rentals are located in teeny-tiny apartments in the big cities, we were not surprised to find many smart storage and organizing features in their kitchens! Here are a few lessons we can all learn from Airbnb kitchens in Korea — whether we’re Olympics-bound or not.

Some cooks like to keep their cookbooks pristine. Others consider those blotched, wrinkled pages an homage to all the wonderful meals they’ve enjoyed. Wherever you fall on that spectrum, there are a few practical reasons you’d want to minimize food spills on your cookbooks.

While there are benefits to cleaning your kitchen project by project or getting really deep into a single cleaning task, sometimes what you really need to do is buckle down for 20 minutes and clean in a crazy flurry of activity to get it spic-and-span in no time. Here’s what to do in order to clean your entire kitchen in less than half an hour. Do not waste precious minutes searching for the broom in the hall closet!

According to the folks at Pinterest, searches for “coffee bar command centers” are up 140 percent year over year, which means we’re not the only ones who can’t even think about looking at a to-do list before a morning cup of joe. Here are a few of our favorites that may just open your eyes to the fact that you need one in your own kitchen, too.

We moved into a new house recently, and after about three weeks of getting settled, we had our first house guests — my sister and her fiancé — for a whole weekend! But between stocking up on food and taking the kids to school and trying to get pictures hung before they arrived, I didn’t get to the last thing on my to-do list: actually clean the house. I fully intended to sweep and mop the floors, vacuum the rugs, clean all the dishes in the sink, and scrub the toilets.

Why is it that, no matter how much you plan and prep, the hour before any party is always spent frantically running around? I almost always spend the time hyper-cleaning things, and freaking out about the pillows being angled just so on the couch and whether the kids left popcorn kernels on the rug last night when they watched a movie before bed.

Bullet Journaling is a way to organize all of your thoughts, notes, goals, and events in one spot: a notebook. The creator of the methodology, Ryder Carroll, came up with this system so that, over time, it’s easier to track your progress, change your habits, and generally get more organized. You know, so you have more time for doing the stuff you actually want to do, whether that’s learning a new skill or cooking more with your family.