Using a Stovetop Video Clips on blindness tips a series of
video demonstrations for daily living skills for the blind and visually impaired presented
in conjunction with the Washington State School for the Blind. The following clip features
Becky Sherman of the Department of Service for the Blind. Becky teaches daily living
skills to blind and visually impaired children and adults. This tip explains how to safely
use a stovetop. When you first teach someone to start with
a stove you first want to always make sure that it’s cool so that there is no fear
of heat. When children are small they are not afraid of anything so they are likely
to touch anything so make sure that everything in the area is safe.
Show them how wide the stove is and how deep so you get a feel of everything that’s here.
There’s knobs on the right hand side of this stove. Oh, there’s a big burner, a
little burner and another little burner and big burner.
That’s important to know, the position of them and the sizes. You want to make your
pans match the size of the burners so you maximize heat, minimize burn opportunities.
First of all once you get a good picture of the stove and how it is then you want to talk
about the knobs. You can Braille them if you’d like. This particular stove has front-right
burner for the first knob and around this knob it has a dot that lines up with off on
the stove. All stoves or most stoves that I know you cannot turn it on until you push
down and turn. When you turn this right hand burner knob
on, it says right hand it’s on and the element begins to get hot. High usually locks into
place. When you turn the knob clockwise you go to medium high and then medium. Medium
is always 180 degrees from off. The rest of these knobs then follow suite
and you can hold your hand over to feel the heat. Once people are comfortable with that
you set your pans on the burner which has the element that’s the part that gets hot
on an electric stove. This element is bigger than the bottom of
this pan so it would be too big so you want to try the smaller burner. Now the pan might
fit over the burner a little bit but it fits better. You’re less likely to get burned
and you have better control over the heat. The way I center the burner when it’s cold,
center the pan on the burner is I set it here and run my hands around the ring here so that
there is equal distance all the way around. If it’s off base it can tip and spill also
you can burn you hand easy so you want to make sure that’s it centered.
Once it’s hot you can run your hand over the top and feel the heat. If there is excess
heat on this side than this side you know that you need to move your pan over. Another
way people like to do if they are afraid of the heat or are not comfortable with the heat
is to use a wooden spoon to check the edges to see if it matches all the way around the
pan and the burner. The other thing about cooking is a lot of
listening and you can hear water boil, it bubbles, especially if you put a lid on it
the lid will bounce. When that happens then you know it’s time to put your noodles in
or turn the temperature down so that it will not boil over.
When you are frying something if it’s a pancake or grilled cheese sandwich or something
like that you can slide the piece of bread or pancake and if it slides on the skillet
then you can flip it over. Then you can tell by the smell. So you use all your senses everything
you can and your knowledge to tell you when it’s time to turn your food over.
If you have your skillet too high and you get the outside of the food done and not the
inside of the food done you can tell that usually by sticking a fork in it, and you’ll
know next time you better turn the temperature down and cook it a little bit slower.
Gas Ranges Most stoves are generally set up the same.
I did find that gas stoves often have the back burners first and the back burners second.
So, we might want to double check that before you start. But there is a little bit of difference
in cooking also. When you fist start it they start on high and you’ll here a “click,
click, click” and a hissing noise and the hissing noise starts when the clicking noise
stops and that means that the flame is on high.
It is a flame it is not just heat like your electric stove, so you want to make sure to
keep things away from it. Keep you arms, if you want to see if it’s hot you are going
to want to start high if you put your hand over the burner. When you turn your burner
down generally once you get to medium you quit hearing the hissing sound.
So that kind of gives you an idea if you do not have your stove marked or if you’ve
used it for a long time and you don’t need to look at the Braille and just want to kind
of guess at it you can now tell that it’s on medium because you don’t hear that gas
sound. If you turn the burner on and it just keeps clicking and clicking and no gas, I
mean you smell gas you know that something is wrong with the pilot light and it’s not
just starting and you need to immediately turn it off.
When you are cooking, when you have your pan on the stove the flame hits the bottom
on the pan and it radiates out so if you have your temperature and the flame. We talked
about the size of pan and size of burner you have to think about size of pan and size of
flame. Obviously you are not going to stick you finger down there to check where the flame
is so you have to, you can umm… You can check for temperature heat and you want mostly
the pan to be hot and very little heat coming around the edges. So that’s how you can
check to see if you have it. Plus, once your food gets cooking you can
tell if its cooking fast or slow and you can make other adjustments accordingly.
Timers A lot of times stoves will have timers on
them and you if you can’t read a timer like I can’t then you need to have one that you
can set. I never worry about a timer on the stove. This one has Braille so that you can
set the timer. If it is an hour timer it has three dots at the top it has 1 dot for two
and half minutes, 2 dots for five minutes, 1 dot for seven and half, 2 dots for ten,
so that’s kind of how it goes all the way around.
Then they have several different kinds. This one is a print one. This one is a Pamper Chief
that maybe you can use if you have some vision but it does not have speech. This one has
a large print display for people with low vision. They also make talking timers so there
is a wide variety out there go to your local- in catalogs or your local store and pick out
the one that works best for you. More video clips on blindness clips are available
from the Washington State School for the Blind at www.wssb.wa.gov.