Call it the tin-imalist challenge.
A mom from the UK devised a controversial way to avoid having to do the dishes — by having her family eat out off a tinfoil-lined table using their hands. Photos depicting her MacGyver-esque life hack are currently blowing minds online as viewers wonder if her shortcut really pays off.
“They really enjoyed it. It was something fun,” Rebecca Cubberly, 28, told Kennedy News. She concocted the scheme to save time and money while cleaning up after meals for her husband, Karl, 30, and two children, Jack, 6, and Evie, 4.
“I normally spend about half an hour cleaning up after a meal like that and it’s a long time to spend cooking and cleaning after a long day,” lamented the mother. She also wanted a way to treat her kids to a lavish meal during their school break without breaking the bank.
To execute the hack, Cubberly laid down strips of tinfoil across the dining table like a discount table cloth. She then adorned it with vegetables, nachos, cheese, tortillas and ground meat, which she cooked in an air fryer to further mitigate the number of dishes. As a final cutlery-saving measure, she had the family eat the energy-saving smorgasbord using just their hands.
Due to the spartan dinner spread, the inventive parent was left with only a “knife and a chopping board to clean.”
“Normally you have five bowls and a frying pan to wash, and we didn’t even use cutlery. Cubberly gushed. “They ate every last bit, there was nothing left, so I literally just had to pick up the tinfoil.”
She added, “I didn’t use the dishwasher, and then only a bit of water for the chopping board.”
As a result of her mealtime hack, Cubberly had an extra half-hour to spend with her children. “I’ve got that extra time I’d normally spend washing up that I can spend with the kids and it’s a bit of a treat without the effort,” she said, adding that her “kids loved the tinfoil.”
Best of all, the Brit said, the hack prevented her from having to do the “difficult job” of bathing her kids, which she left to her husband while she “did the dishes.”
Cubberly has since posted photos of the bare-bones arrangement on social media, where it divided critics.
Some deemed her shortcut ingenious.
“People said it was a smart idea, how great it was and a lovely idea to avoid washing up,” the Brit fawned.
Meanwhile, others accused her of potentially hurting the environment, with one critic writing: “No dishes but [the tinfoil will] sit in landfill for up to 400 years.”
However, Cubberly claimed that she “popped the foil in the recycling” while the other meal components generated minimal waste.
“I didn’t buy taco seasoning, I made my own at home,” she said. “I bought wraps, which have packaging, but there were enough wraps for lunch for my children and everything has packaging. You can’t get wraps without packaging.”
Not to mention that Cubberly’s hack is a helluva lot cheaper than eating out.
“You can take your kids out … to a restaurant and it would cost 50 pounds, and this cost me a fiver,” she explained. “We had just as much fun as if we’d gone out.”
In light of the dinn-foil’s success, Cubberly says she’ll “100% be doing it again.
“We’ll be trying it with lots of different things like pizza … or when we have [leftovers] or when I’m just not in the mood to wash up,” the mother explained. “Hopefully others will do the same.”