Cooking 201: Food Safety

If I were to rate kitchen skills, this would probably top the list. As a dietitian, my food service training has made me overconcerned (sounds better than paranoid) in this area. So, from the get-go, I try and teach the kiddos food-safety. Anyone raising kids knows that santization and children are slightly oxymoronic terms. But just because the battle is uphill doesn't mean we don't teach it – right? Most of these are blatantly obvious, but here are the main points I try to reinforce:

• Hand washing (oh how I'd love a black light and some glow-germ!)

• More hand washing (everytime they taste the food, or cough on their hand, or wipe their face – back to the sink we go!)

• Never tasting over the saucepan and never double dipping with the tasting spoon.

• Separation of raw and cooked foods (grilled burgers don't go on the plate that carried the package of patties).

• Separate cutting boards (meat cutting boards and veggie/fruit cutting boards).

• Avoiding cross-contamination (anything from a knife blade transferring bacteria from the unwashed rind of a cantaloupe to using the same spoon used on chicken to toss the salad).

• Proper cooking temperatures (which foods are safe at what temperatures, how to quickly cool foods, or keep them safely hot, and why).

• How to disinfect the kitchen area – especially, sink, counters and dishrag.

• Favorite disinfectant: 1 Tbsp. bleach + 1 Gallon H2O (especially useful following raw meat prep)

• Dishrag trick: wet rag, do not wring out completely – microwave on high for 2 minutes.

Here is a link to a good source of food safety info: http://www.foodsafety.gov/

Food safety is much more difficult to teach than knife skills because a cut teaches an immediate, obvious lesson, whereas food safety is much more shades of gray in terms of symptoms and sometimes they are rather delayed. But if my kids can internalize some food-safety skills over the next decade or so, I will be one happy Mom, and then yes kids, I'd be happy to come to dinner.