Firefighters cooking with fire: Safety in kitchen
‘Serve Up Fire Safety In the Kitchen’ community cookbook offered
LIVE OAK >> With opportunities to dine out and the winter holidays approaching, local fire officials are delivering some public fire-safety tips with a spoonful of sugar.
The Central and Aptos/ La Selva fire protection districts have pulled together a collection of staff favorite recipes in their “Serve Up Fire Safety In the Kitchen!” cookbook, free for the public to download and print.
The 26- page cookbook has color photos of the finished meals, its entries covering a range of recipes — polenta pot pie and tarragon lemon roast chicken, strawberr y poppy seed salad and artichoke chili dip & chips. Interspersed between the recipes are cooking safety tips and facts, because after all, cooking is the No. 1 cause of home fires and home injuries, according to the National Fire Protection Association.
“People can print it out. We have the PDF on our website,” district administrative assistant Sarah Melton, who organized the cookbook. “So people can download it, print some pages or all pages. It’s just going to be a permanent fixture there, so I think something they can come back to and use through the years.”
While digging into Steve Vratny’s “Steve- o’s Steak & 2 Veg,” cooks are reminded to extinguish small grease fires by covering them with a pot lid. While checking out Melody MacDonald’s “Eggplant, Tomato & Mozzarella Bake,” chefs might glance at direction to avoid cooking while too tired, or when under the influence of prescription medications or alcohol, because “clubbing and cooking don’t mix!”
Tucked near the back of the booklet is “Tex’s Dump Cake.” The recipe, said Melton, was the very same dessert that her stepfather employed to impress his future stepkids while he was courting their mother.
“That was the thing that won us over,” said Melton, who organized the cookbook effort. “You know, the hot pineapple, cherry and ice cream. ‘Ahhh, he can stay.'”
Before getting started, Melton said she did a little research and found out that fire district “alumni” had created an inhouse cookbook in the 1980s. With permission, Melton said she repurposed some of those recipes, from “mostly firefighters’ wives and some firefighters with barbecue and sauce recipes,” and added newer coworker contributions.
The cookbook grew out of October’s Fire Prevention Week’s 2020 theme, “Serving up Fire Safety in the Kitchen,” Melton said. It was also an effort to reach out to community members in a year when the fire districts have had to forego their standard fall open house events due to community gathering mandates for the coronavirus pandemic, she said.
Mindful that many have struggled with their grocery bills this year, between the recession and local widespread fire evacuations, the joint fire districts hosted a drive-up public donation drop- off this week to benefit Second Harvest Food Bank Santa Cruz County. Donations totaled more than $1,000 in cash and filled more than two food barrels, with online donations ongoing at give.thefoodbank.org/teams/14641- centralaptos-la-selva-fire- districts.
Find the “Ser ve up Fire Safety” cookbook online at c entra lf pd. com by t y pin g “cook” into the search bar.