Cooking Nice

In recent times, the risks of Salmonella, especially from cooking chicken, have been discussed so much on TV that you would expect incidences of infection to have reduced significantly. Sadly this is not the case. For people who eat chicken regularly, the perils of getting sick or heaven forbid, dying are still there, and hospitals still treat thousands of victims every year.

Better understanding of Salmonella will help cooks eliminate the dangers and avoid illness or worse.

So what is Salmonella?
It is a type of food poisoning caused by a bacterium that lives in human beings, birds and other animals.
If you are infected with salmonella, the symptoms include fever, diarrhoea, being physically sick (ie regurgitating) and severe stomach cramp. These symptoms can begin within 12 hours after eating the problem food and can last along as 3 days. Normally, people make a full recovery after a few days rest, but sometimes, it can take a nasty turn, requiring hospital care and in some cases, can lead to death.

Beating Salmonella

The advice given to those who are cooking with chicken is :

* Clean your hands AND the chicken before before cooking.
Salmonella can be present on your hands and also on the hands of anyone else how has touched the chicken. Cleaning thoroughly reduces the risks.

* Keep raw chicken away from anything on the kitchen counter.
When preparing a chicken meal, cross contamination is a major danger. To reduce the danger, do not use the same cutting utensils for uncooked chicken as is used for cutting vegetables. It is also wise to have two chopping boards – one for the meat and another for your veggies.

If you take the advice show here, your chicken will be 100% safe and healthy

Assuming you are now feeling a little more upbeat about purchasing and cooking chicken, here are a few other things to consider to make your chicken meals more healthy and tasty.

These days there are many benefits to purchasing ‘free-range’ chickens or even 100% organic chickens. Even the high street grocery stores are beginning to sell ‘organic’ or ‘free-range’ chicken, so gettiing hold of it is easier than ever. This is a welcome development because many of us have become aware of the fact that the larger chicken farms are just trying to make more money and not looking out for the health and wellbeing of their poultry, or the end consumers. The name, ‘free-range’ is usually better known by those seeking to have a healthier eating lifestyle – it needs the chickens to have access to the open air and be allowed to walk around and eat naturally instead of being restricted to a small pen, or stuffed into a barn with thousands of others. Free range chickens live a happier and less stressful life, and this results in a taster meat, and a cleaner conscience for the consumer.

If you want to cook more chicken, you can easily discover a good selection of chicken recipes by visiting any of the collections of free recipes on the internet or by visiting your local library. Poultry recipes are almost always healthy recipes, providing you use the food safety tips shown here.

Organic chickens, which may also be ‘free range’, have the extra restriction that they are not pumped with antibiotics, hormones, herbicides or pesticides. Many people think that both Free-range and organice chickens taste better and are juicier.

Did you know that organic chicken breasts have only 10 fat calories, 110 thigh calories and a whole chicken only has 130 calories?
If you are on a diet, that has to be worth knowing, right? Chicken is major player in many diet recipes.

If you are trying to build muscle and are trying to increase protein levels, free-range chicken breasts have 22 grams, thighs have 19 grams and the whole chicken has 21 grams – all of that from a meat that is also delicious!