Energy Saving Kitchen Tips

1. Use the right size pan for the job, and the right sized burner. It may sound silly but you can waste a lot of time and energy trying to boil a giant-size pot of potatoes on a tiny burner.  And you can waste a tremendous amount of energy warming up a small pan of sauce on a giant burner.  If you can see more than a half inch of overlap, either the pan overlapping the burner or the burner overlapping the pan, see if there’s a better fit.
2. Don’t preheat oven. Have you ever been pressed for time and just shoved that tray of chocolate chip cookies in an oven that hasn’t been preheated?  What happened?  Presumably you may have had to add one or two minutes to the cook time but it certainly didn’t add ten minutes or more to the cook time.  With many ovens it takes 10-15 minutes to warm up to 350 degrees, and that’s wasted energy.
3. Use smaller appliances for smaller jobs. If you’re making an open-faced sandwich, warming up leftovers or eating those frozen and ready-to-cook cookies, then skip the oven and use your toaster oven instead.  It uses less energy to heat up.  Additionally, your microwave can be used to steam, reheat and even to make eggs, melt chocolate and warm up canned foods in much less time and with much less energy.
4. Use a Slow Cooker. When you are making soups, stews and even roasts, consider using a slow cooker instead of cooking them for hours on top of the stove.  Slow cookers use less energy and you can cook your meals during low energy times in your home.

You can save TONS of energy focusing your attentions and habits on JUST your kitchen habits!

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Stay Green!

               

Slow Food

I recently learned about one of the latest crazes in the “green” movement and I thought it was pretty interesting.  It is called “slow food”.  According to Wikipedia, the slow food movement actually began in Italy as a way to “combat fast food”.  The idea was to preserve cultural cuisine.  Since its origins in Italy the slow food movement has spread across the globe as not just a way to cook, but also a way of living – the fresh, true, organic way.

A few of the main things that the slow food way of life encourage are:

• More organic farming - doing away with things such as pesticides.
• Less genetic engineering in products we eat – the slow food movement lobby’s against this.
• Educating people on the risks associated with fast food and other not so wholesome ways of eating.
• Keeping culinary traditions alive, including using fresh and true to the original ingredients.
• Teaching gardening methods to people.

Slow Food USA is a great place to get information on the slow food movement as well as information on local chapters and events (such as a local slow food potluck where you just may get to try something you didn’t even know existed).  The slow food movement helps to create nutrition programs in schools, mobilize youth to help created programs and educate communities, and also form what is called an “Ark of Taste” which lists hundreds of foods that are in danger of disappearing from our grocery shelves – the idea being that if these foods are promoted people will once again buy them and use them, thus ensuring that they continue on in our diets.

This whole movement makes me think about and wonder just how much of what we eat is not in its original form.  I once had a friend tell me she wouldn’t eat corn anymore because it had all been so genetically modified that it wasn’t even what God created as corn to begin with.  If you look around your pantry and refrigerator you would be hard pressed to find something that wasn’t chemically altered in one way or another.  Food has been so altered that most people don’t think it tastes good if it hasn’t been processed a few hundred times.  It’s really sad – I mean, if we all were to be taken back to the Garden of Eden right now we probably wouldn’t want to eat anything God provided because it didn’t come with a list of ingredients a mile long or in a box.  I know that is a bit harsh, but that is how we live these days.  I think it is time for all of us to do an analysis on our kitchens and just what it is we are feeding our families.  Are you up for that challenge?

Copyright ©  2009, Becki, Green Christian Network, All Rights Reserved

               

So, What exactly are green bags anyway?

Have you ever put fruits or vegetables into your refrigerator only to come back the next day to get them and they have already turned a yucky color or have soft spots in them where there should not be soft spots? There are many refrigerators that have special compartments in them that are supposed to be for the preservation of these types of foods, but they still never seem to keep the freshness of the foods the way that they should. Now there are green bags that you can purchase in order to allow your fruits and vegetables to last longer when you put them into the fridge.

These green bags are a revolutionary bag that was invented by a lady named Debbie Meyer and they are revolutionary due to the fact that they make your fruits and vegetable last days and even sometimes weeks after other fruits and vegetables that were not put into the bags last. Green bags come in medium and large sizes in order to hold your food so that there is no more waste of your food. With the cost of food nowadays, it really pays to find a product that could make your fruits and vegetables last a lot longer.

Green bags help to control the humidity that would make your fruits and vegetables go bad along with keeping away any mold, bacteria, fungus, and decay that may occur. Green bags will save you money in the long run due to the fact that they make your fruits and vegetables last so much longer and you can reuse them up to a total of ten times which also saves you money. Many people can’t even stock up on fruits for their kids because they go bad so fast but not with these bags.

You can go to the store and buy apples, oranges, melons, carrots, peaches, and many other types of fruits and vegetables and store them in green bags so that whenever you or anyone in your family wants to have a fresh bite, they know that what they choose will not be rotten or bad. Green bags work really great when you have a green vegetable garden growing because usually you grow more than what you can eat in a week.

Green bags are a way to make sure that none of your hard work with your garden goes to waste.

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Stay Green!