Food Matters

Found this on the internet and I thought I should share it with you guys..
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By: Sue Radd

While surveys show that most people feel confidant about food safety in their home, millions suffer from food-borne illnesses each year. Being savvy at food safety is important for everybody, but especially for pregnant women, children, people who have a compromised immune system, and seniors.
Clean, Separate, Cook, Chill

The following four steps will help you and your family to avoid getting sick from the food you eat.

1. Wash your hands properly before preparing food. Use soap and running water for 20 seconds and then dry your hands with a clean hand towel for 20 seconds.
2. Prevent cross-contamination from one food product to another, from equipment to food, and from people to food. Store raw foods separately from those that are cooked or ready to eat, and always keep utensils, surfaces, and equipment scrupulously clean to avoid contamination with bacteria and viruses.
3. If you eat meat, cook it thoroughly until there are no longer pink spots inside and the juices run clear.
4. Avoid storing food between 40 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit (5 to 60 degrees Celsius)?what I call the ?danger zone? temperature range?in which bacteria grow most rapidly. Bacteria can double in number in as little as 20 minutes! If food is out of the refrigerator and in the danger zone temperature for more than two hours, food poisoning bacteria can begin to grow. Chill any hot food that you won?t be using immediately as soon as it stops steaming and you can hold the dish without burning yourself. It doesn?t need to get cold first. A good general rule for food storage is to keep food cold unless you?re going to use it later in the day, in which case you should keep it hot. Don?t let it cool and sit for several hours.

If you have stored food correctly after cooking it, use your sense of sight and smell for a basic appraisal of the contents. The best temperature for reheating is 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Use refrigerated leftovers within three to five days, and when in doubt, throw it out!

I like my steak medium rare to a bit on the rare side. I think I'll take my chances.

Yeah, and get a disease like food poisoning or salmonella... I like my steak WELL DONE.

I've been hearing stories of people cooking a Christmas dinner that is a turkey stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken. It sounds so wrong that I wouldn't be surprised if it leads to some new incurable disease.

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Originally Posted by Rodri

I've been hearing stories of people cooking a Christmas dinner that is a turkey stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken. It sounds so wrong that I wouldn't be surprised if it leads to some new incurable disease.

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I hear they call them 'Turduckens'

^ Yep, doesn't that sound appetising?

My family has that for dinner christmas day....................................

Mmmm... Medium rare steak

Cooking is for the weak. Real men eat their food straight off the animal.

"Rare implies dangerously cooked. When I say rare, I mean just let it look at the oven in terror and then bring it out to me!"

Bonus cool points if you know the quote without google :)

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Originally Posted by Ruyuk

Yeah, and get a disease like food poisoning or salmonella... I like my steak WELL DONE.

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Oh dear god. When will you all grow up and learn to ignore media hype? My family and I have been eating BLUE steak for generations, without problems. This hyper-clean hyper-safe culture that people are trying to create is putting us more at risk of things like this. My parents didn't stop me as a kid when I got filthy, ate just about everything in sight etc..... And now what's happened? Oh look, I'm bloody healthy. I'm ill much less than just about everyone I know, because I've developed an immune system. And straying slightly back on topic to the steak issue, as long as it's cooked in a correct manner, even blue steak is perfectly fine.

What's blue steak? Never heard of it. (Since I have Romanian heritage, I eat mostly Romanian foods.)

Blue steak? Like the po-po steak?

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Originally Posted by Ruyuk

....The following four steps will help you and your family to avoid getting sick from the food you eat...

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Do you realize by our society becoming more and more germaphobic we are creating super germs?

Better tip, use common sense and build up your immune system with vitamins and proper diet.

PS Medium rare is the BEST!!

To those who asked what blue steak is;

http://michellemalkin.cachefly.net/m.../1googleit.jpg

The following is an excerpt from the first google result;

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First off: What is a Blue Steak?

If you think about the difference between well done and rare, well there is just as much difference between rare and blue. It’s way beyond Very Rare. I’ve seen “blue steak” variously described as: take a cow, rip off any horns, wipe it’s arse, and throw a match on it; or my personal favourite: steak so rare, a good vet could bring it back to life!

Don’t get me wrong, a blue steak is not Steak Tartare (which is completely raw), it is cooked though of course definitions vary as to what “cooked” means when it comes to a blue steak. When I left home as a teenager, I believed a simple idiom: If it’s not brown, it’s not cooked. So whenever I had steak, I always had it Well Done. So guess what: I hated steak! I rarely (haha) ate it, as it was tough, chewy and tasteless. I couldn’t see why everyone seemed to rate a “good steak”. It all tasted the same to me: like boot leather.

Over the years though, I figured that as half the population hadn’t died by eating rare steak, maybe it didn’t kill you on contact after all! Perhaps people were right that rare steaks were “cooked”.

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The following is an except from the Steak Wikipedia page (second result on google);

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vocabulary has evolved to describe the degree to which a steak is cooked. The following terms are in order from least cooked to most cooked:
Raw - Uncooked. Used in dishes like steak tartare, Carpaccio, Gored gored, tiger meat and Kitfo.
Blue rare or very rare - (46?C [115?F] core temperature) Cooked very quickly; the outside is seared, but the inside is usually cool and barely cooked. The steak will be red on the inside and barely warmed. Sometimes asked for as "blood rare" or "bloody as hell". In the United States this is also sometimes referred to as 'Black and Blue' or 'Pittsburgh Rare'.
Rare - (52?C [125?F] core temperature) The outside is gray-brown, and the middle of the steak is red and slightly warm.
Medium rare - (55?C [130?F] core temperature) The steak will have a fully red, warm center. Unless specified otherwise, upscale steakhouses will generally cook to at least this level.
Medium - (60?C [140?F] core temperature) The middle of the steak is hot and red with pink surrounding the center. The outside is gray-brown.
Medium well done - (65?C [150?F] core temperature) The meat is light pink surrounding the center.
Well done - (71?C [160?F] and above core temperature) The meat is gray-brown throughout and slightly charred.
Overcook - (much more than 71?C [160?F] core temperature) The meat is dark throughout and slightly bitter.

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Remember kids! Google is your friend!


EDIT: I'll throw in a link to a picture of some nice, blue steak for you curious people to fully understand. I won't post it as an image though, as some of the squeamish people here may hurl all over their keyboards if they don't like the sight of such things. http://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/images/cooking-a-blue-steak1.jpg

Yea, Me and google are not the best of friends since i searched to find chuck norris.

I'm a fan of "fresh is best".Preservatives are a larger risk to a humans health than most bacteria you may see as harmful.Many of these bacteria are not only helpful yet essential to digestion and nutrient absorbtion.Cleanliness is pleasant.Hate when my hotcakes taste like fish fried with Penquin sauce.Chillin is cool,keeps the micro's from jumpin ship.I'll have to look into the spectrum on this "blue steak" I thought it was a shade that occurs primarily right before the green and yellow collide.

I remember when I was a child, we would pull carrots or turnips straight out of the ground, give them a quick rinse and start eating. Our eggs came straight from the hen-house to the kitchen and would only get the poo wiped off with a dry cloth. Our milk was delivered in a billy can and was unpasteurized because it came straight from a real dairy and my mother would buy fresh rabbits from men who would trap and dress them, then sell them door to door.
As children we were hardly ever sick and most of our doctor visits were to fix the results of our misadventures (broken bones, cuts, etc.). We knew where our food came from and we weren't concerned by germs because it was fresh. That is the key to healthy eating. Eat fresh.

All this, in my opinion... is bs. (sorry mods, i couldn't think of a better word)

Like with the whole tomato-salmonella deal. What, 1000 out of millions in the U.S get salmonella poisoning from eating tomatoes and everyone freaks out?? The FDA goes berserk, they stop tomato sales... i mean wtf!? That whole thing was just a stupid mess. An overreaction... just like most "crisis's" related to food.