Today. . .

Did a double-check of the chicken nugget recipe, and the oatmeal cookie recipe. Debating whether to include instructions for cooking bacon and for turning leftover rice into fried rice. Exhausted from cooking and caring for sick toddler.

I was intrigued to find this food bank cookbook, written by professional chefs, that I sent off for a copy. However, I see that the "monthly" recipe on the website was posted last August. That doesn't bode well. Hopefully they are just concentrating their efforts in non-internet applications. I suspect that food bank clients are largely webless.

More disturbing is that the August recipe, a chicken dish, makes no mention of how, or even whether, the chicken is supposed to be cooked. Hopefully this was just left out when the recipe was copied onto the website. Possibly it's just a typo, but it's a dangerous typo.

Yes, dangerous. Recently I heard a non-cook coworker talk about following a recipe for making chicken quesidillas. Because the recipe said something along the lines of "add cooked beef, chicken, or blah. . .", he assumed that the chicken could be added raw. And he ate the half-cooked results, which makes me shudder. Let this be a reminder to myself to be absolutely watertight in the instructions that I write. I must be sure to follow the advice I once gave a friend on writing papers for law school: start by explaining that water is wet. (I still take pride in that tidbit of wisdom. I must have learned it from my father back in my school days.)

I was also stopped in my tracks recently when a friend mentioned the deliciousness of raw bacon. He was unaware of the danger of trichinosis.

I must remember not to take my knowledge of food safety for granted.