'How to not start a fire while cooking' isn't everyone's culinary specialty, which is why Fire Chief Trent Lee with Weyburn Fire Services has offered some tips for avoiding costly kitchen fires.

"We have had several cooking fires in the last couple months and it was time to just reiterate a few good practices for everybody, because cooking does bring family and friends together, and it provides a nice outlet for creativity and can also be relaxing," he noted. "But, it's also the number one cause of home fires and home injuries." 

"To prevent these fires, we want to cook with caution. We always want to be on alert," explained Lee. "If we are sleepy, or we've consumed alcohol, we shouldn't be using the stove or stovetop. We always want to stay in the kitchen when we're frying or boiling, grilling food. If we leave the kitchen even for a short time, we should be turning off the stove. If we're simmering, baking, or roasting food, we should check in regularly, make sure that while the food is cooking we should be using a timer or something, to remind us that we are cooking."

"And in case something catches fire, we want to have something close by that we can use to smother that fire," he explained. "It can be as simple as a cookie sheet or a metal lid off of a pot, and we would just slide it sideways onto the pot that our frying pan and then turn off the stove, and leave the house and called 911 to have Fire Department coming to check to make sure everything's okay."

Lee said grease fires don't run out of oxygen. 

"They keep burning until they burn up all the oil in the pan, and it does produce lots of black smoke which can damage other parts of our houses as well," he said. "It is pretty toxic smoke combined with the materials that are in the pan themselves, to prevent sticking like Teflon and other coating materials. It does produce pretty toxic smoke that can leave a short of breath and thus end up sending this to the hospital for a visit."

Putting out oven fires, he said, are a more simple solution. 

"It's as simple as turning off the heat and keeping the door closed and letting the contents cool down, open the windows and doors to let it ventilate," he shared. "But if something is burning we want to make sure when we do leave that we keep our doors and windows closed. We want to keep that house nice and tight so there is not a lot of extra oxygen for that fire to grow."

"Sometimes we have fire, we call it 'decay', and a lot of the times it's due to lack of oxygen or lack of fuel, and as soon as we open up our doors and windows, we're providing that extra air, and that can cause a fire to grow substantially, and sometimes it's just not to the point to where it's hot enough to ignite."