Cooking a meal at home is a great way to spend time with family, but dinnertime can be interrupted with annoying thoughts of kitchen cleaning. Make post-meal cleanup simpler and easier with these quick kitchen cleaning tips:

Use aluminum foil. If you’re cooking with an oven-safe pan, dish, or baking sheet, use a sheet of aluminum foil over its surface and place the food on top. After the meal is served, simply remove the foil sheet from the dish and toss it in the recycling bin. Now you have one less greasy pan to cleanup!

Spill it? Clean it. Keep a damp dishrag handy and wipe up any drips or drops as they occur. This proactive kitchen cleaning approach helps keep the area neat and tidy, plus doesn’t allow any time for messes to get dried on. Using a washable rag helps reduce paper waste, too.

Think ahead. When you’re in prepping-and-cooking mode, consider what you’ll need to wash later. To keep kitchen cleaning efficient, don’t pull out every utensil and piece of cookware you own. Wipe clean and reuse the same knife to chop different veggies. Serve food in the pots you cooked them in rather than using separate serving bowls or dishes. These simple shortcuts will help reduce the number of dishes and utensils you need to wash later.

Make tough jobs easier. You could soak pots and pans to loosen up food residue. But why not skip the soak and get the job done all at once? Try using products made specifically for tackling tough, baked-on messes, like Dawn PLUS with Power Scrubbers^TM. It does a great job of cleaning dishes like macaroni and cheese or lasagna without any presoaking or tough scrubbing, letting you get back to family time in no time.