Do sufficient cooking, and you’ll ultimately injure or irritate some a part of your physique. Between sharp blades, scorching burners, soiled ovens, and ornery onions, there are numerous methods to irritate a number of of your senses. The eyes are significantly susceptible to abuse, as they’re fairly delicate. (Although they’re much less prone to be injured than your fingers, that are at all times within the line of fireplace.) Fortunately, there’s an simple approach to keep away from killing your eyes: Get an affordable little fan and hold it in your kitchen.
A fan’s main job is to maneuver air round, and you need to use one to maneuver “dangerous” air away out of your eyes and out the window (or not less than out of the kitchen). In case your casserole spills over and your oven begins to smoke, you possibly can level a fan towards the fireplace alarm to silence its cries, then level it in direction of an open window to get the smoke out of your home. (Preserve the oven closed, nonetheless. Opening it up simply lets oxygen in, and oxygen is what drives combustion.)
Even when your kitchen isn’t smoky, it’s good to have a fan round to drive disagreeable fried aromas or lingering fishy smells out the window. (I like fried meals, however the scent of fry oil persists.)
And whilst you can enlist security goggles, water, and even your freezer to chop down on onion tears, one of the best ways to fight syn-Propanethial-S-oxide (the violent compound liable for your watery eyes) is to bodily transfer it away from the chopping board and out of the room, and a fan can accomplish that. (It’s the one method Alton Brown will lower onions, I’ve heard.)
Even higher, this trick works immediately: There’s no ready for the syn-Propanethial-S-oxide to be immobilized by the chilliness of the freezer, and no dunking something in massive buckets of water. All you must do is about a fan subsequent to your chopping board so the air blows throughout the onions and is flowing perpendicular to your physique. As soon as it’s positioned, flip a swap and get to chopping, letting the fan blow the dangerous air away and saving your tender eyes from pointless ache.
