2013-08-07-Kitchen Safety
Seminars@Hadley
Kitchen and Food Safety First!
Presented by
Patty Jacobs
Sue Melrose
Moderated by
Dawn Turco
August 7, 2013
Dawn Turco
Good Morning and welcome to today’s Seminars@Hadley. Our topic today is Kitchen and Food Safety First. Joining me in the seminar room today as presenters are longtime instructors Patty Jacobson and Sue Melrose.
I’m Dawn Turco and I am Senior Vice president at Hadley. The three of us are low vision or blind home cooks, and probably thought that we had a handle on kitchen and food safety, but I’ll have to admit that as an individual, I found that as I researched a little bit the topic, I had let some of the best practices get a little relaxed in my kitchens.
So, if you’re a long time cook, maybe you’ll have your practices tweaked today or perhaps hear something that you didn’t know as did I. So let’s get under way. Again, the topic is “Kitchen and Food Safety First,” and I am as co-presenting, going first.
So I have a little bit of a quiz, and for those of you who have been with us before when we do this, basically these quiz questions are A, B, C type of answers. So if you feel like you want your answer to go into the text box, you don’t have to, you can think it if you prefer. But feel free to type I A, B, or C and then we’ll reveal the correct answer.
Let’s go through just a few of these for some thought, and I’m going to get started with the question that’s asked: What’s the highest safe temperature for your refrigerator? A.) 32 degrees Fahrenheit or zero degrees Celsius, B.) 36 degrees Fahrenheit, 2.2 degrees Celsius, or C.) 40 degrees Fahrenheit 4 degrees Celsius.
And if you want to type those in feel free to do so. A, B, or C. Oh we have a brave soul out there. A few more typing in. I see actually a little combination of A’s, B’s and C’s going. Well the correct answer is 40 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the answer C, or four degrees Celsius. Bacteria most rapidly multiplies between 40 degrees Fahrenheit or four degrees Celsius, and 140 degrees Fahrenheit or 60 degrees Celsius. So you fridge should always be below that 40 degrees or four degrees mark.
Next question: What should you not do if there’s a grease fire in the kitchen? A.) Dump as much water on it as you can. B.) Smother it. C.) Douse it with a fire extinguisher. What should you not do amongst those choices? Let’s see if we’ve got anybody guessing on that one. Lots of A’s, which is the correct answer. You do not put water on a grease fire. If the fire is on the stovetop, you can put a lid on it to smother it, or if it’s in the oven, keep the oven door shut for the same reason. Of course, you can use a fire extinguisher as long as it’s not spraying water.
But I’ve also read that if you get a fire and if it’s not a small one, that you don’t think you can handle it, just leave. Shut the door behind you and in the US you call 911. I’m not sure what you do in other countries, but you certainly don’t want to risk any injury to yourself or your family. So that’s the other sidebar. You can evacuate. Let’s see: What is the safest place to defrost food? A.) In the microwave. B.) On the counter. Or C.) In the refrigerator. A, B, or C. You all did real well on that one. I see a lot of C’s and the FDA here in the States aid you should always defrost in the refrigerator to keep the nasty bacteria at bay. So, good answers. You guys are doing pretty good.
Let me see if I have another one here that we want to fit in now. Okay, here’s an interesting one, but I may trick you on this one, or all of us: How long can frozen chicken remain fresh in its original packaging? A.) six months? B.) Two months. C.) Expiration date on the packaging. Let’s see, a little bit of hesitance I see there. Actually, now this is chicken that you have put in the freezer in its original packaging. The chicken can remain fresh in your freezer for up to two months in its original packaging.
Sometimes I go fishing for something in my fridge and I find something that may have been in there a little longer than that, including chicken. So something’s can stay longer, but that’s the recommendation on frozen chicken in the original packaging. I have some other quiz questions. I find those fun. I hope you do too.
But we do want to get started and today I am starting off with the subject of food safety, and then Sue and Patty are picking up with other topics, mostly around kitchen safety. I read that food poisoning will send more than a hundred thousand Americans to the hospital this year. That seemed like a lot of folks to me and then I saw where it said that one in six Americans would get sick from food poisoning this year alone as well.
And those are some startling statistics. I found those online and I found a great, great, great website called FoodSafety.gov. It will be on our resource list. For those of you first timers, we do have resource lists to go with these seminars. So they will be posted on the Hadley website. Anyway, on this website along with lots of other good information, they gave us some wonderful tips and separated them into four categories.
Clean, separate, cook and chill. And gave ideas associated with each one of those. So starting with clean, working hands and surfaces is often the key message there. Of course many of us know that we need to be doing this, and this is one of the arras you can get a little lax in, but it’s really important that we keep our hands, utensils and cutting boards surfaces clean as we’re out in the kitchen, and that cuts down on the spread of bacteria. The site offers up advice on how to wash our hands. I’m not going to go through all the points but if you want detailed instructions on hand washing, you can certainly find them there. But it primarily involves twenty seconds with soap and running water and additional little clue of what you’ll see there is the Happy Birthday song comes up times two. So if you’re wondering about how long you should do that, there’s you clue there, Happy Birthday times two.
Washing surfaces and utensils is important after each use, and we want to wash the cutting boards, the dishes, utensils and counter tops with hot, soapy water after preparing each food item before you go on to the next, because that will help again with the cutting down of the bacteria and spreading. Now, they offer, and it was interesting because we also put this in the new Hadley Course on Independent Living and one of the many courses is on cooking and cleaning and whatnot.
Patty may have more to say on that since she is teaching it, but I have not tried this, and maybe you have, as an extra precaution, you can use a solution of one tablespoon of unscented liquid chlorine bleach in one gallon of water. So the mixture is one tablespoon of the chlorine bleach to the one gallon of water to sanitize and wash the various surfaces and utensils.
I saw on another website where they cut that down to one teaspoon of the bleach to one quart of water, and I’ve not tried this as yet. So if you have, maybe when we open the mike you can let us know If you’ve done that. On a another seminar we talked about washing fruit and veggies and this food safety says but not meat poultry or eggs. And that actually got us into an interesting discussion here at Hadley for those of us presenting today we were talking about this and some people happy routinely for example washed chicken before you prepared it, but the site definitely recommends not doing that because as you wash the meat you chance spreading the bacteria more than what would happen if you just cook it and it’s killed off. That was interesting.
And of course, washing veggies. Even those that have exteriors that you think you need not wash like a watermelon or a cantaloupe for example, that you’re not pealing necessarily because the knife can take any exterior bacteria into the inner flesh as you do that. I’ll tell you that the site mentioned that there was good news that bagged produce marked pre-washed is safe and I have a big question mark next o that because of all the things we hear in the news. I certainly used to take bags of the salad, lettuce combos and just use them right out of the bag, but I’m second thinking that. I already covered why we don’t want to wash the meat.
Going on to the second category, separate. Cross contamination. I was so aware of this this past weekend. I had a hugely full fridge and company in the house, that’s why there was so much food around. And keeping things kind of separated in the refrigerator in a key point. Even after you’ve cleaned your hands and surfaces thoroughly, raw meats, poultry, seafood and eggs can still cross contaminate ready to eat foods that you keep in your fridge. So they have some simple safety ideas. Use separate cutting boards, we’ve covered that in other seminars as well, and once a cutting board gets excessively worn you want to develop the habit of maybe buying a new one or being sure that you reseal it, or make sure you clean it thoroughly.
We talked about keeping meats and poultry separate, but separate raw meat, poultry, seafood and eggs from other foods in your shopping cart. Now, that got me to thinking. Typically at the store, we’ll put all the cold items on the conveyor belt first because we want them bagged together. I happen to keep a small cooler in the trunk of my husband’s car, so during these hot summer days, I can put some of the meats, milk and what have you in the cooler to help get it home a little bit cooler. But I hadn’t thought about some of the other products. So that was an interesting tip.
Place raw meat, poultry and seafood in containers or sealed plastic bags to prevent the juices from dripping or leaking on to other foods in your refrigerator, that’s a good one as well. And it said, keep eggs in the original carton, and store them in the main compartment of the refrigerator, not on the door. I found that interesting, since a lot of refrigerators I thought had egg sections on the door. So, foodsafety.gov surprised me in a couple places.
Cooking was the third category. There’s an entire chart, and I’ve put it on the resource list of where you should have your meat cooked, for grilling or in the oven. And we have accessible meat thermometers out there now, so it’s entirely possible for you to go ahead and use a thermometer to test your meat, to make sure you cooked it to the proper temperature. Again, I put that on the resource list.
Chilling. Refrigerating this promptly. How many of us had thought we’d just leave the leftovers on the counter to cool off little bit, walked out ofthe kitchen, and then rediscovered them how many hours later? How safe is it? What is the guideline? Here is the point that is raised on food safety. Did you know that illness causing bacteria can grow in perishable foods within two hours, unless you refrigerate them. If the temperature is above ninety degrees Fahrenheit in the summers in the US as it often gets here, it’s a good idea to get things refrigerated after one hour.
Again, we covered the refrigerator temperature that’s safest, and then the advice is to pack your refrigerator with care. To properly chill food and slow bacteria, cold air must be allowed to circulate around the fridge/ So for this reason, it’s important to not stuff your refrigerator. I was feeling a little guilty about that this past weekend.
We covered that you never thaw on the counter. Safest in the refrigerator. Know when to throw the foods out Keep an eye on what’s going on in the refrigerator. Keep an eye to throwing those older foods out. There’s lots of other advice and tips and myths covered on the site, so please go to the resource list and link off to FoodSafety.gov.
There was so much more than just can’t be covered in the amount of time we have here today. So, before I release the mike and we go on with Patty and Sue, any questions?
Caller
Hi it’s Jade from Canada. Sorry, I signed on a little bit later than I would have liked. I’m just curious, what was the safest temperature for your refrigerator to be at? I did miss that portion of the webinar
Caller
Hey, this is Sally from Iowa and I am new to the seminar, and I just want to make sure that I am okay that you are receiving my text that I type. So just let me know when you can.
Dawn Turco
Hi there, I’m Dawn and I’m back again. In answer to the first question, thank you for joining us from Canada. I did have a Celsius conversion. Forty degrees Fahrenheit or cooler in that main compartment, which is I believe four degrees Celsius. So you want to be sure that you kind of keep it there.
And yes we could hear you and I have not read a single text message since I started my part of the presentation, I’ll get back to that now. I want to give kitchen safety its chance to get going and the first topic we have there is Patty’s. So Patty, I’m giving you the microphone.
Patty Jacobs
Good Morning everybody. Thank you for coming to the seminar today. I’m Patty Jacobson, and I’m the person that teaches the food series here at Hadley and I’ve done quite a few food seminars too. In talking about kitchen safety, I want to talk a little bit about knife safety.
A lot of times people think, “Oh the knife, they’re going to get hurt. The blind person’s going to get hurt, the knife is too sharp.” But in reality, you want the knife to be really sharp because the force that it takes to cut through something is much less when the knife is sharp. If you have a dull knife, you’re having to push down really hard. That could cause whatever you’re cutting to move or roll, and then you just wack your fingers, and you don’t want to do that.
Don’t leave the cutting edge of the knife toward you or towards your fingers. And I have to tell you. I think there are so many seasoned cooks out there that peel and cut in their hand, and my Mom is one of them. She can peel an apple in her hand. She can peel potatoes. She’ll cut tomatoes in her hand. And I just as a blind person would not do that. I would use a cutting board.
Don’t leave knives loose in a drawer. First of all, banging around can dull the blades, but you can also grab a hold of the knife blade when you’re searching for the knife that you want. And I have to tell you. I am guilty, guilty, guilty of that. Because I do have my knives in a drawer. I’m really careful when I reach in, but I have gotten nicked a couple of times. This is just common sense, don’t try to catch a dropping knife. Just let it drop to the floor and then pick it up later.
Wash dirty knives separately. Don’t drop a dirty knife in the sink full of dish water or other dishes. And I have to tell you, when I started keeping house, I was just learning things, and I was pretty careless and I had the dishwasher door down and I had the knives placed in a dishwasher blade side up, and they were dirty. Anyway, I stepped backwards and ran into the dishwasher door, and kind of fell on to the knife and I stabbed myself and I had to go to the hospital.
You don’t want to play around with these. Even thoughyouthink it’s common sense. When you put the knife down, if you’re doing something keep the edge of the knife facing the cutting board, that way it’s just a rule, you know where it is. There’s a little bit of information about broken glass. I’m just going to go through this really quickly. If you break a glass, listen to where it fell, hopefully you have shoes on and use a whisk broom to help you find the gritty sound of the glass and then use wet paper towels and a garbage pail to throw the towels away. There’s more information about that in some of the courses that we teach at Hadley if you wanted more information about that.
Feel free to email me at . What I’d like to do now is turn the mike over to Sue. She’s going to talk a little bit about kids in the kitchen.
Sue Melrose
And of course which is for children ages three to six, and we talk in there a lot about kids in the kitchen. One point I’d really like to make is the kitchen is really the most family centered room in the house. It’s not only used for preparing and eating and cleaning up meals, but it’s also the place where family members go to talk and share and be together. You know I sort of joke, it’s the place we probably got our first bath in our life in the kitchen sink.