For some people their kitchens are the most used room in the home. When a family has several children it can be busy at all hours of the day and even sometimes at night. Cooking is nothing more than a great hobby for many people that just enjoy being in the kitchen and creating fabulous dishes, but for busy families cooking can sometimes be a hurried affair that when there are hungry mouths to be fed.



Normally, the kitchen is a safe room for everyone, but there is one thing that can happen in the kitchen more often than other rooms of the home and that is fire. Fires can get started in the kitchen area easily if you turn your back for a moment too long or become preoccupied with something in another room while cooking is going on. It is very important to use care when we cook to prevent a fire from starting needlessly.

One thing that causes many kitchen fires is when someone puts a pan of grease on the stove to heat. If the temperature is set too high, it can only take a very few minutes for the grease to bubble over and turn a stove top into flames. Grease fires can be difficult to put out and anywhere the grease goes, the fire will follow. Never, ever leave grease cooking and go off and leave it. As a matter of fact, it is not a good idea to leave anything unattended that is cooking unless it is on a very low temperature or in the oven and even then it needs to be checked regularly.

Sometimes when we put something on to cook on top of the stove or in the oven that requires a long cooking time, make sure that you do not leave any items like pot holders or dish towels any where near the stove. Leaving items like these too near the heat can catch them on fire and start a blaze easily. The one thing about some fires is that they can burn quietly for several minutes and you may not know there is a blaze going until the smoke alarm goes off. It is always a necessity to keep a working smoke alarm in the kitchen at all times.

Two other items necessary in a kitchen are a fire extinguisher and a box of baking soda. You know what the fire extinguisher is for, but they can make a terrible mess and might not be necessary to use if a cook top burner catches on fire. Sometimes dousing a spot of grease on a burner with a liberal douse of baking soda will extinguish the flame safely and there will be a much smaller mess to clean up. Both of these items need to be near the stove somewhere.