Avoid Kitchen Mishaps

January 16, 2009 on 3:54 pm | In Home Safety Tips and Topics, How To's and Helpful Tips, The Heart of Your Home | No Comments

The basics of cooking are essential when you are fairly new at it.
• Allow plenty of preparation time as well as time needed for the recipe.
• Always be sure to have all the ingredients and every utensil needed; ready and in its place when the time comes for its purpose. This goes along with any recipe.
• Be sure to always have plenty of oven mitts available while baking. You can never have enough around.
• If you are preparing meat such as a big ham make sure to have a thermometer, so that you can know the exact temperature of the center, instead of going on what the outside of the meat is looking like.
• Keep your mind on the task at hand. Know the steps that you are going to do before you get to that point. If at all possible try to get your chopping done quickly and safely.

There are many mistakes newbie cookers make for example: When you’re trying to make a favorite comfort food such as Ham & Bean Soup, it is easier to buy the already chopped ham provided by the grocery store. Although it is a great idea to use a Sugardale ham only if you have the time to make it, and by that I don’t mean by starting the ham at 5:30 p.m. and expecting it to be done at a reasonable time. With that said when forgetting you have a thermometer somewhere an hour after you have started the meat, try to stay away from opening an oven door with a mitt on one hand and pulling out an oven rack with the other hand that doesn’t have a mitt. Caution: Very painful! Even though you can get easily distracted by preparing other elements to the meal such as cornbread, when you are to check the meat and you have the oven mitt on the proper hand, and you pull it out a ways to check the temperature and you think you’re in the clear, your not. Remember that the thermometer is just as hot as the oven rack. So don’t grab it unthinkingly to push it in farther because that too hurts very badly.

In conclusion, cooking takes time and patience and pre planning is always the most important, especially when it is finally time to eat at 9:30 p.m and it’s not a favorite to the rest of the family. Cooking is trial and error, but in the end if you are satisfied with what you have accomplished that’s all that matters, and there’s always peanut butter and jellies for the others.