Eco-Tips

I have a lot of blog posts that include various eco-tips, but as time goes on and more posts pop up, they may be harder to find, so I added this so that they are all condensed into one place.  The green concept is so important to me… and I want to pass on what I learn as far as green cooking to my readers.

A couple of links to click on, for green posts I have that were a little much to copy and paste:

6 Ideas for Eating Wholesome Foods without Breaking the Bank

A List of Green Tips

• “Lidded Cooking”:  When food is cooked in a fry pan, stockpot, saucepan or Dutch oven, the heat makes steam rise from the food and the cooking liquid. Steam is a form of energy. Adding a tight-fitting lid to the pot can cut cooking time and/or energy by as much as 75 percent, according to Ehrlich’s just releasedThe Green Kitchen (Kyle Books), a guidebook for reducing energy and waste.
• A sharp knife is a key to a low-carbon kitchen. It’ll help you slice foods thin. Using a mandoline is another option; it’s especially helpful for slicing potatoes. The thinner you slice foods, like potatoes when preparing Fiery Fingerlings, the faster they’ll cook – and the less carbon you’ll be adding into the atmosphere.
• Use It, Don’t Lose It:  There’s no need to peel a fingerling – or any potato. Enjoy them “earth style” by keeping the skin on. It adds flavor, texture, and nutrients. That’s a win-win-win. Just remember to wash – or scrub – it well first. And choose organic varieties whenever possible.
• Use the right-size pot on your stove burners. You could save about $36 annually for an electric range or $18 for a gas range. Five percent of the energy bought and used per person in the United States is for preparing and cooking food. Over a year, this exceeds twice the energy a person in Africa uses to power everything in his or her life.
• Do you realize how bad plastic silverware really is, and how much we all take it for granted? This is from The Green Book: Use silverware, and plates, not plasticware, in the cafeteria if you have a choice. Even one office worker using just 1 plastic knife per day could add up to 250 a year. If every other worker used just 1 a day, it would amount to 15 billion plastic knives a year, enough to create a plastic blade 1.5 million miles long.
• Little Green Cooking Tip… Whenever a recipe calls for scallions, use both the green and white parts. The white part has a stronger flavor and should be cut smaller than the green part when used raw. Or cook the white part within a recipe and use the uncooked green part as the finishing touch.
• Use it, don’t lose it… Have extras? Skip the plastic containers. Store your “spare savories” (leftovers) in containers that can go straight from the fridge to the microwave or toaster oven, and then to the table – so you’ll only need one dish instead of three.
• Why Go Organic? … You can lower your exposure to pesticides by 90 percent just by choosing organic varieties of fruits and vegetables. If just 1 percent of the nation’s farmlands converted to organic (nonchemical) agricultural systems, it would remove 26 million pounds of pesticides per year from food we eat and from the environment. If you buy organic, you will encourage this kind of farming.
• The best eggs to buy are eggs that say “Cage Free” or “Free Range” somewhere on the carton… because this means that the chickens are not confined to a small cage just for the purpose of producing your eggs. It means the chickens are free to roam and live a better life. Maybe not everyone cares about the quality of a chicken’s life, but I do. Also, look for chickens that are fed an organic diet, because the same as your fruits and vegetables, this means less pesticides are making their way onto your plate.
• You know how when you get to the end of the bottle of mayonnaise, there’s that last stubborn bit you can’t get out? And you feel completely wasteful throwing it away? Well, did you know that if you pour just a little bit of vinegar into the bottle, it will help break up that last bit of mayo? It’s still perfectly useful, for one, and second, if you’re like me and like to clean your plastics out before recycling them, this is a no muss, no fuss way to do so without wasting a bunch of water! Easy as can be!
• When cooking and baking, try to avoid food waste by using perishable ingredients before they spoil, measuring carefully, and saving leftovers for future needs instead of throwing them away. If you could reduce the amount of food wasted in your household just by twenty-five grams per day (about the weight of a slice of bread), you’d save twenty pounds of food annually – roughly enough to make sixteen meals. If all U.S. households reduced their food waste by this amount, the savings would be enough to provide three meals per day for a whole year to each of the 1.35 million children in the United States who are homeless.
• If you have the option, buy your meat from the butcher counter and buy only as much as you know you’ll use. You reduce food waste, save money, and conserve resources. The average person wastes over twenty-two pounds of edible store-bought meat each year. Given that it takes five pounds of grain, and 2, 500 gallons of water to make one pound of beef, that’s more than one hundred pounds of wasted grain and 55,000 gallons of wasted water per person! If all households decreased their beef purchases by just one pound per year, 250 billion gallons of water would be saved. It would take five days for this amount of water to pour over Niagara Falls.