There are a lot of little ways to save energy around the house. Most people know the basics, such as turning the thermostat to a lower temperature in winter and wearing a sweater. But it’s easy to not think of your energy use when you’re cooking.

This can seem like a pretty small thing. After all, cooking is not a large part of most people’s day. But it is one of those things you can do to make a difference.

We’ll start with putting a lid on the pan when you’re cooking. If you don’t need direct access to the food, having a lid on the pan means it will cook faster. This is particularly evident when you’re boiling water before adding spaghetti. The water boils much sooner with a lid on.

Having the lid on the pan helps to keep your food at the right temperature for cooking, while you can have your stove on at a much lower level since less heat is lost out the top. If you don’t like to spend a ton of time in the kitchen, this also translates to a shorter cooking time.

Another factor to consider is how long you preheat your oven, or if you even really need to. I very rarely preheat mine, as it takes only a short time for it to reach the required temperature anyhow. I make an exception for anything that is more sensitive to temperature, such as when I bake bread. But meats and casseroles don’t need to start out at that perfect temperature.

A tool I’ve been learning to use is my pressure cooker. It takes a bit of practice, but it can cook many foods in under 10 minutes. It’s one of the few things that I’m considering finding a cookbook for since I have very few pressure cooker recipes.

My slow cooker, on the other hand, is used very regularly. Despite how long it spends cooking, it can use less energy than the oven (depending on the type of oven you have). It’s also very easy to have just about the entire dinner in one pot. Throw in a roast and put the potatoes alongside it.

Another favorite way to make quick, just about one dish meals is to stir fry. The chopping takes extra time, but that means the meat cooks very quickly. As a bonus, it’s one of the few ways I can be sure that my husband will eat his vegetables. The fact that everything only needs a little cook time really helps. If you need a little more intense cooking time, throw a lid on for a little while and decrease the heat so things don’t burn.

And of course, there’s the microwave. Meats generally don’t cook up too well in them, but for reheating leftovers or giving vegetables a quick steam they’re very efficient.

As you build up your cooking habits to use energy more efficiently, you may come to appreciate how fast many of these methods are. There’s nothing like doing something that saves you both money and time.

Some stats I researched and did my best to work out:

Electric Oven	$.30 – $.60 per hour
Electric Range-top Burner	$.07 – $.30 per hour
Gas Oven	$.05 – $.11 per hour
Gas Range-top Burner	$.04 – $.08 per hour
Microwave Oven	$.01 – $.03 per 10 minutes

from Flex Your Power

Since they didn’t have crock pots listed, I had to do some more research to figure it out. A crock pot runs about $0.02/per hour, whether on high or low, according to this PDF file on Making Cents of Electricity.

Using these figures to guess how much each cooking method can cost:

Appliance	Assumed Cook Time	Cost
Electric Oven	1 hour	$0.30 – $0.60
Electric Range-top Burner	20 minutes	$0.02-$0.10
Gas Oven	1 hour	$0.05 – $0.11
Gas Range-top Burner	20 minutes	$.01 – $.03
Microwave Oven	3 minutes	$0.01 or less
Crock Pot	4 hours (on high)	$0.08
Crock Pot	8 hours (on low	$0.16

Of course, there are a lot of assumptions here, and one of the problems is that I couldn’t get all my numbers from a single source, so it’s kind of hard to say how accurate the numbers for the crock pot are relative to the others. I figure the others should at least be accurate enough in relation to one another, since they share a common source. The PDF showed the crock pot to be using about 150 watts on high, versus 70 on low, so clearly there’s some roundoff in there.

So it’s possible that the gas oven is more cost effective to use than the crock pot, but the crock pot easily beats out the electric one. Just depends on what you have around the house.

And of course I can’t imagine doing any serious cooking in a microwave. I won’t get into the arguments for whether or not they’re healthy to use at all here, except to note that all cooking changes food, not just microwaves. To me they’re adequate for reheating leftovers and maybe a quick steam of some veggies, nothing more.

Technorati Tags: cooking, energy use, saving energy, food

My husband and I do a lot of composting of our food waste. It’s really not that hard… well, for me. He’s the one who goes and turns the compost pile, things like that. I just make sure the food scraps I make end up in the pile in the first place.

Some food waste is going to happen. If you peel a cucumber, obviously that’s going into the compost pile. Same for chopping the dried up end from broccoli.

But other food waste could be avoided if you just pay more attention. This is one of the areas where composting helps me to notice it more. It’s a rather more concious act than just scraping the leftovers into the trash. Or worse, the fresh fruits and vegetables you forgot to use before they spoiled.

Of course, not all leftovers are suited to the compost bin. Cooked foods don’t go well in a lot of them, nor does meat. Citrus peels tend to decompose very slowly. And worms just plain don’t like onions or citrus.

Our compost bin was pretty easy for my husband to make. Our landlords left a bunch of scrap construction materials, including a bunch of cinderblocks. He stacked those into a 3-sided box. The fourth side is open for easy access, and we keep the pile lightly covered.

Compost piles can accept more than just food. Soak and shred old cardboard, and throw it in. Other kinds of paper can work too. Leaves and grass can go in.

There are a lot of options for those who don’t want to build their own compost bin. Amazon carries a nice variety of composting supplies, and of course books on composting too. Green and More also carries a few composters in their garden department.

Of course, while composting can help you to become more aware of what you’re wasting, it’s still best if you can remember to eat the food you bought, rather than sending it to the compost bin.

One trick I use is to eat leftovers from the previous night’s dinner for lunch whenever possible. I’ve been trying to get my husband to do likewise, since otherwise he eats lunches that are cheap and convenient, rather than healthy or green. If I fall behind, excess leftovers go into the freezer if they freeze at all well.

Leftover salads and chopped raw veggies, of course, don’t fall into this group very well, but they are popular in my house. I know I overdid a salad if it ends up compost. Chopped veggies are such wonderful snacks for the kids that I guess I should be grateful my kids love them so.

While composting doesn’t solve all the problems associated with wasting food, it does take care of it filling up landfills, and puts the extras to some sort of a use. We’re pretty happy gardeners around here, so our compost ends up helping to produce some pretty nice food for our family.

Technorati Tags: compost, composting, food waste

Yep, I’m late on this debate. But we just put up our Christmas tree, and my husband and I were talking about it.

For our situation, the answer is obvious. The artificial tree makes more sense because we already own it. We’ve had it for 3-4 years, and it just makes the most sense to continue using it.

Ours is a cheapie. He used to work at Home Depot, and caught it on clearance for $9. Can’t beat the price.

But when you don’t already have an artificial one, I’d say go real. Tree farms keep growing them, and if you have a fairly local tree farm, the transportation isn’t that bad a thing.

My favorite Christmas tree was the one we had the first two years of our marriage. It was a live tree, in a pot. We didn’t succeed in keeping it alive, though. But that was my favorite way to have a ‘green’ Christmas tree. We’d hoped to someday plant it in a backyard when we owned a home.

If you choose a real, cut tree, one of the key things to do is make sure it gets recycled when you’re done with it. That’s easy in my area; there are a variety of drop off points designated. We’ll see places where trees get stacked for a couple weeks after Christmas, then they get picked up.

Once you’ve picked your tree, you can keep focusing on keeping what’s on it and under it as green as possible.