Cross-contamination. It wasn’t a word I was familiar with until Craig and I met, and I began learning how to prepare food for someone who has celiac disease (or any other severe issue with gluten).

If you have a severe food intolerance, you know that meals and snacks can become a very stressful thing. There’s always a question in the back of your mind… Will this food make me sick?

Different people with gluten sensitives have different thresholds of how much gluten they can ingest before they become sick. But as a general rule for celiac disease, the limit is 10 milligrams of gluten. To put that in perspective, if you took a slice of bread and cut it into 350 pieces, each piece would contain about 10 milligrams of gluten. It only takes a tiny crumb.

I distinctly remember the first several times Craig and I cooked together. Once we were preparing dinner for ourselves and all the kids, and the kids were eating a high fiber vegetable that Craig knew at the time tended to upset his stomach. That was the night I learned once a utensil touched the food he couldn’t eat, it couldn’t go back into the bowl of food he could eat. It was a simple concept, just one I’d never learned before.

As a general rule, our house operates completely gluten free. It keeps concerns about cross-contamination out of the way and makes the process of preparing food a lot simpler for us as a family. It also reduces stress for Craig, because he knows that to the very best of our ability, the food in our house is safe for him to eat without causing sickness.

But not everyone has the option to make a home completely gluten free. Maybe only one person in your family is sensitive to gluten, and it’s not feasible economically to switch the whole house’s eating habits. Or, you may find yourself cooking in someone else’s home—for instance, when we travel, we stay at Airbnbs. This gives us access to our own kitchen, which we need, but that kitchen always already has gluten in it. And on rare occasions, we’ve intentionally had gluten in our home—usually when I am pregnant and struggling with food aversions. Every once in a while, I need access to a specific food, and I need to know how to keep my kitchen safe for Craig, while also meeting the needs my body has as well.

By no means is this an exhaustive list, but here are a few simple things to keep in mind to avoid cross-contamination when preparing food.

Don’t share utensils.

I mentioned this earlier, and it’s such a simple step. If you are cooking multiple foods, make a habit of assigning each dish a utensil while you cook, and then don’t allow those utensils in the other food.

We do this on a regular basis, even if everything on the stove is gluten free. On occasion, I’ll cook something for the kids that is gluten free, but not certified gluten free. We know the kids are good to eat it, but Craig isn’t. By making sure my utensils don’t cross dishes, I eliminate the risk of making Craig sick.

This extends to other areas as well.

For example, if you have gluten bread and gluten free bread in your home, how do you handle butter? Once a knife has swiped through the butter and then touched a piece of bread with gluten, it can’t go back into the butter dish. If it does, the gluten free person in your home can no longer eat from that butter until it’s been used and the dish has been washed.

Or toasters? Once a toaster has had gluten bread inside it, it’s impossible to fully clean. And given that it only takes a tiny crumb of gluten to cause sickness for someone with celiac disease, that toaster is no longer safe for someone with celiac to use. For that reason, our toaster only has gluten free bread inside of it.

Over-clean.

This applies to a lot of areas.

If you’re cooking in a kitchen that’s not your own, you start with a good cleaning. Don’t overlook things like the microwave turntable, the sink, and potentially the oven racks, depending on what you’ll be cooking.

If anything with gluten has entered out home, I pay attention to exactly where it was on the counter, and then I thoroughly clean that area when I’ve finished eating. That washcloth then immediately goes into the laundry bin to be washed and doesn’t go back into the sink or touch any other part of the kitchen.

Dishes that have had gluten on them are usually hand washed and then also run through the dishwasher. The cloth that was used to clean them goes directly into the laundry without touching anything else. If a sponge was used to clean them, that sponge is usually thrown away.

The main thing here is that anything you’ve used to clean dishes or wipe up gluten is then immediately removed from the kitchen. It isn’t rinsed and then re-used; it doesn’t return to the kitchen until it’s been completely washed and dried.

Pay attention to your clothes.

For a season, we lived in a home with a kitchen on the main floor, and then another in the basement. If ever I wanted to bake something with gluten, or prepare a meal to take to someone, I would use the basement kitchen. This way, I knew our main floor kitchen was always safe.

I frequently wear an apron while I’m cooking and baking, and it’s not uncommon to wind up with flour or batter on it while I work. I made a habit of always removing my apron anytime I left the basement and putting it on as soon as I got downstairs. This helped avoid accidentally cross contaminating our gluten free kitchen upstairs.

As I said, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but hopefully it’ll help you get started on the road to avoiding cross contamination.