Make Your Kitchen Safer With This Organization Tip From Martha Stewart

Kitchens often function as the heart of a home — a place where families gather to enjoy regular meals or celebrate birthdays and holidays, making memories over fun and indulgent mac 'n cheese grilled sammies or everyone's favorite takeout. However, kitchens can also be dangerous, as cooking requires the use of razor-sharp tools like knives, along with the heat from the stove or oven. That's why lifestyle icon Martha Stewart recommends keeping well-stocked, portable first aid kits within easy reach.

Though you likely already have first aid supplies in your home, keeping a kit in the kitchen isn't just convenient — it can drastically reduce the time between the injury's occurrence and its treatment. Upon sustaining a cut or burning yourself while attempting a flambé, things need to happen quickly. Food should be removed from the heat to avoid burning it, and the injury should be addressed as quickly as possible. That's much easier to do if you don't have to rush to the bathroom and rifle through your medicine cabinet.

Instead, as Martha Stewart recommends on her Up Close & Personal blog, it's best to dedicate a kitchen drawer or another small space to storing supplies for remedying cooking-specific injuries like cuts and burns. The faster you can cover a burn or wrap a bleeding wound, the less likely it is you'll contract an infection. It can also help you avoid food safety concerns by keeping your kitchen free of bodily fluids that could contaminate your food.

While you can certainly purchase a pre-stocked first aid kit to keep in your kitchen, Martha Stewart suggests putting one together yourself to ensure you have the supplies necessary to address injuries you're most likely to sustain. To help assemble the portable kits, Stewart and her assistant consulted with the entrepreneur's physician for guidance on deciding what to include. You can do the same by consulting the professionals at your local pharmacy to save space in your kit and make it easier to use by only stocking exactly what you'll need. 

When deciding what to keep on hand, think about the injuries you're most likely to sustain while cooking and what you'll need to treat them. For instance, Stewart and her assistant included blood clot powder, burn dressing, and cotton gauze in their kits to address cuts from cooking knives or burns from touching hot pans. They also added bandages in various shapes and sizes, along with pain relief pills. 

As for storing everything, convenience is key. It's tempting to tuck everything tightly into a plastic container and shove it in the back of a cabinet, but that'll make it hard to reach your supplies. Instead, keep the container open in a drawer close to your cooking space. Better yet, Stewart suggests adding multiple small containers to a drawer and filling each one with a specific item so you have less to sift through in an emergency.