Cooking dilemma's

Can I just say, that cooking would be a blast if it didn't leave messes like this?! Making a good, homemade meal takes me an hour-an hour and a half usually...then the family sits down and eats it and it takes them approximately 10-15 minutes from start to finish to gobble it up...THEN comes the clean up (lucky for me, we take turns doing dishes and I have children that have dish nights too), that could take another 1-1 1/2 hours...it doesn't seem right that something that takes so long to prepare and clean up can be devoured in such a short amount of time........