You could consider your kitchen to be the ‘heart’ or the ‘brain’ of your house. Life and happiness depend upon good food and that makes the kitchen to be the nerve center of your home-sweet-home!

We are here today to discuss some of the safety norms to be followed inside your kitchen to keep mishaps at bay. Follow certain golden rules while inside the kitchen – it contributes to your happy and healthy day-to-day living. After all, a good life coupled with some good food is all that we are toiling for!

Talking about the safety measures in your kitchen, the first few things that are to be kept in mind are the potentially hazardous kitchen ingredients! Needless to say, the kitchen houses highly inflammable objects like the gas pipeline, electric gadgets like the microwave, and even your cleaning chemicals!

Without further delay, we’ll get straight into the thumb rules…

Fire extinguishing mechanism in your kitchen –

Just having a fire extinguisher in your kitchen is not enough. Make sure that you are adept at using it too. Unfortunately, practice at times, makes us overconfident. In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, we often tend to be lesser and lesser careful. We tend to forget that it takes only seconds for a fire to get uncontrollable.

Kitchen fire extinguishing incorporates some DIY measures too. Fires in your kitchen could primarily be of 2 types – grease fire and electric fire. As a home remedy, you could even use baking soda to put out a fire. Microwave fire can be done away with by just turning off the appliance and keeping the doors closed.

A fire must never be put out with water!

Wear proper clothing –

Proper clothing relates to ‘no synthetics’ inside the kitchen! Synthetic clothes get heated easily and might melt onto the skin! Additionally, long and baggy sleeves should be avoided too – they could easily catch fire from a gas stove.

Be careful with your knife –

Keeping a knife sharpener handy is the best thing to do. That’s because a blunt knife is more likely to slip and injure your hands than a sharp one. Sharper the knife, easier and smoother becomes your job of cutting vegetables. The chances of cutting your hand are averted too.

Kitchen safety involves the safety of your health too –

Cutting your fresh fruits and vegetables on one hand and the raw meat on the other should strictly not be done on the same cutting board. Indeed, as per FDA guidelines, the cutting board for raw meat, poultry, and seafood should be a separate one. Else someone at your home could be inflicted with as perilous as salmonella poisoning!

Check the building up of carbon-monoxide gas

CO is a poisonous output from the incomplete burning of fuel. The latter could be anything – natural gas, propane, heating oil, gasoline, coal, etc. It builds up because of burning in confined spaces having insufficient ventilation. CO is a silent killer – it binds with the red blood cells in your body and the latter lacks oxygen consequently. The detection of CO is difficult without a detector that’s fitted with an alarm. As soon as the alarm goes out the detector needs to be in a CO-free zone to go off.

A carbon monoxide detector is a check on CO poisoning as it detects the presence of CO quite before it affects your health and symptoms show up!

No matter how many of the safety thumb rules you have adopted you cannot afford to be a little less aware while cooking! This goes without mentioning that children should not be left alone in the kitchen at any point of time (even if you are done with all your kitchen work).