CAMPING HINT - Washing Dishes in a Coffee Cup!

Just sitting around the campfire tonight and thought I would write a quick little blog with the camping hint. I will do a campground review blog of the place we are at after we get home tomorrow. 

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Here is a camping hint I learned a while back... When camping with the limited amount of water, doing dishes can be a problem. Who wants to waste a gallon or two or three of water just to do dishes? Especially when you only have 30 gallons on board?

How on earth can I do a meal's worth of dishes in a coffee cup? 

(Well almost)

First, you need a coffee cup. Preferably dirty. 

Fill it up with hot water. If you don't have hot water right away, don't waste cold water running down the drain trying to get a cup of hot water. Instead either heat up the cup of water in the microwave or on the stove in a small saucepan.

Into that coffee cup, put a liberal squirt of dish soap. Then get yourself one of these cute little dish scrubbing brushes.

Now with the invention of this wonderful new Dawn Powerwash spray bottle, you can do extra duty by just pre-wash zapping each of your dirty in dishes with a squirt of sudsy soap.

Like so:

Go ahead and wash each dish and cup and silverware with the brush... dipping it back and forth into the hot coffee cup and scrub them up one at a time. Rinse each one holding it over the soapy sink with the quickest little rinse. Rinse them one at a time from the faucet, turning it on and off between each dish. The water from rinsing ends up in the bottom of the sink underneath the other unwashed dishes. 

Stack each rinsed dish into the dish rack. 

By the time I am done with all of the other dishes, all I have left is the big insert pan from my Instapot. 

There is less than an inch of water in the bottom of that sink as you can tell by the coffee cup below.

Now I can wash the big pan and roll it around in the bottom of the sink with the remaining water and give it a good scrub. A quick rinse and I am done.

I've used probably a quart or so of water.  

And all of my dishes are done!

So technically, they are washed with a cup of soapy water, and they are rinsed from the faucet with a bit more. 

I know some people will just shrug their shoulders and say "So what? Just use paper plates."

We really don't like wasting paper plates or filling up the garbage. This way we can still eat on real dishes with real silverware and still be cooking our own food in our camper.

Now.... Back to that campfire and I will write another blog post tomorrow.

Happy Camping!