For cooking, how clean is clean enough?

I moved into a new apartment last week. It's an old one — 120 years give or take — in a converted brick mansion with slanting maple wood floors and a non-functional butler bell in the wall of the hallway. Its kitchen cabinets are much too narrow for my oversized Le Creuset pots; oil pools to one side of the skillet when I cook on my crooked little stove; and every time I sear something, I set off the fire alarm. But none of this matters, because I've achieved an unspoken goal I've had ever since I started documenting my own cooking as a food writer in 2009: white-quartz countertops.