When preparing foods, follow four basic steps—clean, separate, cook, and chill.
Clean

Wash
your hands and the counter with hot soapy water, and make sure your
utensils are clean before you start to prepare food. Clean the lids of
cans before opening. Rinse fruits and vegetables under running water,
but do not use soap or detergent. Do not rinse raw meat or poultry
before cooking—you might contaminate other things by splashing
disease-causing microbes around without realizing it.
Keep your refrigerator clean, especially the vegetable and meat bins. When there is a spill, use hot soapy water to clean it up.
Separate

Keep
raw meat, poultry, seafood, and eggs (and their juices and shells) away
from foods that won’t be cooked. That begins in your grocery cart—put
raw vegetables and fruit in one part of the cart, maybe the top part.
Things like meat should be put in the plastic bags the store offers
and placed in a separate part of the cart. At check-out, make sure the
raw meat and seafood aren’t mixed with other items in your bags.
When you get home, keep things like raw meat separate from fresh
fruit and vegetables (even in your refrigerator). Don’t let the raw meat
juices drip on foods that won’t be cooked before they are eaten.

When
you are cooking, it is also important to keep ready-to-eat foods like
fresh produce or bread apart from food that will be cooked. Make sure
your hands, counter, and cutting boards are clean before you begin. Use a
different knife and cutting board for fresh produce than you use for
raw meat, poultry, and seafood. Or, use one set, and cut all the fresh
produce before handling foods that will be cooked.
Wash your utensils and cutting board in hot soapy water or the
dishwasher, and clean the counter and your hands afterwards. If you put
raw meat, poultry, or seafood on a plate, wash the plate in hot soapy
water before reusing it for cooked food.
Cook

Use
a food thermometer, put in the thickest part of the food you are
cooking, to check that the inside has reached the right temperature. The
chart below shows what the temperature inside food should be before you
stop cooking it. No more runny fried eggs or hamburgers that are pink
in the middle.
Bring sauces, marinades, soups, and gravy to a boil when reheating.
Here's a Tip
Why is it safe for my steak to be pink in the middle, but not my
hamburger? When meat is ground to make hamburger, bacteria can be spread
throughout the meat. A higher cooking temperature is needed to kill the
bacteria inside. But, in a solid piece of meat, any possible bacteria
remain on the outer surface where they are killed more quickly.
more
-http://amcsma.blogspot.com