This is why I used to hate cooking.

But one day I was watching Gordon Ramsey work with a home cook and the home cook was trying to keep up with Ramsey.

It was amazing because Ramsey kept his whole cooking area so clean and organized, and the home cook's area looked like a tornado passed through. At that point I had an epiphany and started trying to keep organized like Ramsey.

Pretty quickly I became very efficient and clean in the kitchen. This is a skill that takes practice and experience and is as integral to cooking as the actual cooking.

Now I think about the order I do things, the order I use my tools, tool placement, tool cleanup, and surface cleanup as I cook. The result is that very rarely do I have more than a single pan (or two) to wash after cooking, and the kitchen is usually cleaner when the meal is done than when I started.

I put this to the test, last Thanksgiving when I cooked a large meal for 5 people over the course of several hours and when I was done I did not have a single dirty dish (other than those being used for serving/eating) and my dishwasher was empty. It felt good because just a year prior I would have had a destroyed kitchen with a sink full of pots and pans and dirty counters.

I call it "kitchen craft" (like field craft) and if you work to practice it, it gets better every time you cook. And it makes cooking so much easier. For instance, making something like tortillas from scratch used to be a huge endeavor because I'd have such a big mess to cleanup afterword. It seemed daunting. Now I will make tortillas on a whim because I wan't a breakfast burrito and my kitchen will be clean before the pan is even hot enough to cook the tortillas.

Theres two approaches to solving this. If there is more than one of you, or you have kids, then the person who cooks doesn't clean. The other (more sensible approach) is once you enter the kitchen, you don't leave it until the meal is done. If a meal takes 30 minutes from prep to plate, chances are a lot of that time is waiting. Cleaning during that time is how you minimise that cost. I cook every other night (and we have leftovers in between) and we have food on the table, with everything but serving dishes within an hour from when I get home most evenings.

I find it pretty hard to get cooking down to 30 minutes of actual clock time spent working, not counting cleanup (I do a decent job of cleaning as I go anyway). Most recipes with short nominal "hands-on time" achieve it by not accounting for the prep to have all the ingredients ready, as specified in the ingredients list (dicing vegetables, grinding & mixing spices, cutting up meat, that sort of thing) and usually the shorter the nominal time the more important it is to have all that stuff ready from the start, as there's little slack to do that as you're cooking.

Yeah true but a lot of time it ain’t happening, kids too young, wife too tired, or you cooking for yourself etc. So there is always a situational thing going on unless you have a military style home rules. The best is still to enjoy it. Even when cleaning I find a way infuse joy, like having a system and always find ways to improve speed, then marvel how fast and good it was done