When it comes to preparing food remember three words: bigger, bolder, brighter.  Products such as coloured chopping boards, different colour plates, bowls, mugs and glasses can help to distinguish where food or liquid is whether you’re going to chop, eat or drink it.

Let’s say that you want to prepare yourself a salad or cut some vegetables to cook.  How could you chop an onion or other veg apart from going through the task methodically?  What about using an everyday good quality afro comb.  Make sure that the prongs of the comb are not plastic, cut the onion in half, push the comb in to the food and using the gaps between the prongs slice safely and neatly, to dice the onion just pull out the comb, turn the onion and push the comb back in to the onion, slice and now you have chopped some veg.

What about using other ingredients?  How are you going to find them amongst other tins and packets?  How would you identify them?  You could just open every tin until you find the one you want.  Before you go ahead and do this just hold on a minute, there are easier ways.  You could get someone to help organise your cupboard shelves and only put baked beans on one shelf and the tomatoes on another.  A much simpler way is to use markers or gadgets such as Bandits.  These are rubber bands with different shapes and colours on them.  Use as many times as you like.  Put on bottles, jars and tins, a diverse tool that could help you identify the jar of jam from the jar of peanut butter, equally, you could use them to give you a visual and or tactile difference between your shampoo and your conditioner bottles.

Continuing with knowing one tin from another, the Penfriend audio labeller might be the gadget for you.  This device uses stickers stuck on to the thing you want to identify.  Hold the pen over the label, press the record button and speak in to it the name of the product and any instructions that might help for future use.  Although this gadget costs more than the Bandits you could label anything from your CD collection to tins and packets in the kitchen.

Have you ever spent hours over the family roast and want to know if the chicken is cooked?  The talking thermometer that is on display in our resource area here at Southampton Sight could take the worry out of knowing if food is cooked.  This simple device tells you within seconds the temperature of the food that the probe is pressed in to.  No more umming or aahing over whether the chicken needs to be cooked for another 20 minutes.

Keeping with the theme of cooking, I am going to mention the word baking. When you lose your sight or it is progressively getting worse you do not have to give up a previous hobby, you could even start a new one.  Measuring cups with tactile shapes on the bottom can help you find the cup measure you want. Although these shapes are pastry cutters, what does it matter when you want to still do something you love.

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