Safe Food Handling Tips for the Hot, Lazy Days of Summer
The hot days of summer are here. Food safety is more important than ever when the temperatures are soaring. Using some simple summer food safety guidelines will help to keep you and your family safe from those awful bacteria that just love the hot weather and your food!!!
ryan_groceries on Flickr.com
1. When shopping for your groceries, always buy your cold foods (meat and poultry) last, right before you check out. This way you can also spend time shopping and looking for bargains instead of rushing because you have cold items in your shopping cart.
2. Reserve space in your shopping cart for the meats and poultry. Don’t just lay your packages of meat and poultry on top of your fresh vegetables or packs of chips. The packages may be leaking and the meat juices can get onto the other packages and cross-contaminate them.
3. Drive straight home from the grocery store. You need to refrigerate your meats and poultry within 1 hour on days when the temperature is above 90 degrees. If you live further away from the grocery store, take a cooler along with you and pack your cold items in ice before heading home.
4. Once you get home refrigerate your meats, poultry, and other cold items first.
5. Always thaw meats and poultry in the refrigerator and not on the counter.
6. Planning on using a marinade on those steaks? Make sure you marinade them in a covered container in the refrigerator. Don’t leave the container out on the counter to marinade.
7. What about the left over marinade that you’ve just taken the meat out of? Want to reuse it? Boil it first to kill any bacteria. Really it’s better just to buy an extra bottle of marinade to use in making sauce. This way you avoid taking the chance of cross contamination.
8. Are you transporting cold meats or dishes to another location? Don’t forget to use an insulated cooler with plenty of ice or ice packs. Keep the cooler out of the direct sunlight and only open the lid when necessary.
9. Pack soda cans or bottles in a separate cooler from the one with any perishable food.
10. Make sure to keep all cooking utensils clean.
11. Don’t use the same platter for raw meats and cooked meats to avoid cross contamination.
12. Cook food thoroughly.
These are just a few suggestions for safe food handling in the summertime heat. I’m sure there are a lot more safe food handling tips out there. Leave us a comment with some of your tips!
Till next time,
JT Locke
The Frugal Housewife
Hope you’ll link up these helpful tips on Momtrends:
http://momtrends.blogspot.com/2009/06/friday-feasts-fennel-salad.html
These are some great tips – maybe you can find some tips for keeping picnic foods safe. For some reason your post reminded me of when I would go on picnics with my family. I would almost always be sick to my stomach that night. I figure it must have something to do with the potato salad being in the heat.
Sheila
Adding to what Sheila said, avoid mayonnaise based salads if you’re having an outdoor cookout/party/picnic.
Make sure grilled foods are cooked all the way through by using a meat thermometer (just because it’s charred on the outside doesn’t mean the inside it cooked.)
Don’t leave sandwich meat, refrigerated dips, or fatty foods outside without ice or other cooling methods for more than 1 hour (you can leave out chips, cut veggies and other room temperature stable foods).
Have separate utensils for dishes and keep them separate to help prevent food contamination.
Make sure kiddies are supervised so they’re using the right utensils and not wiping their noses with their hands and then pawing through the hot dog buns.(And remind everyone to wash their hands or at least use a cleaning wipe before handling food.)