Eco-Friendly Kitchen How-Tos with Behind the Burner
July 2, 2011 by admin
Filed under Kitchen Accessories
www.behindtheburner.com Learn how to clean your kitchen the green way, conserve energy and incorporate local fresh market ingredients into your cooking by making your kitchen eco-friendly. Protect the environment and your health with these simple, beneficial steps. “Trick Always use the smallest size pot or pan necessary for the cooking task and match the cookware to the right size burner. Cooking with a 6-inch diameter pan on an 8-inch burner wastes over 40% of the available energy. Technique: Most things in the kitchen can be cleaned with a basic mixture of vinegar, baking soda and lemons. For bigger jobs, choose natural, plant-based cleaning products. For trash, consider using newer biodegradable, recycled plastic bags. Tip: Buy as much food as you can locally. Most produce in the US travels an average of 1500 miles from farm to plate. That’s a lot of wasted fuel! Buying local also supports small farmers and the local economy. Tip: Make smart, informed choices at the supermarket. For a complete list of seafood caught in an environmentally-friendly manner and those to avoid, check out the Greenpeace website. Trick: Think before tossing out food scraps. Many vegetables work quite well in making a chicken or vegetable stock. If you or a neighbor has a garden, save your kitchen scraps in a compost pail and store under the kitchen sink. Trick: Easily save energy in the kitchen by changing incandescent bulbs to compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs). These bulbs fit in a standard …
Video Rating: 4 / 5
Cameron MacNeil, design editor of Canadian House & Home magazine, offers tips on environmentally friendly kitchen renovations in this video. H&H senior editor Trish Snyder also explains how to source eco-friendly, “green” appliances, cabinets, flooring, fabrics, backsplashes and countertops. For more great design, decorating, cooking and entertaining videos, or to order a back copy of the original article in the May 2008 issue, including sourcing information, visit www.houseandhome.com
Video Rating: 5 / 5
Love the part about saving scraps of food- those always seem to go to waste! And a great reminder because I always forget to unplug things too – great tips!
Green is good, but the “little” things are mostly feel-good measures or things you’ve been “sold” on. For instance, all of your tips combined probably don’t come anywhere close to conserving the amount of energy used in disposing of your old non-stick pan, manufacturing and shipping your new non-stick pan.
-Your Kitchen-Aid is not likely one of those constant energy users. You could check with a kill-a-watt meter, but since the Kitchen-Aid is old school, I’d think there’s no transformer or digital circuitry before the power switch… More than likely it’s just got a nice big heavy duty relay. Power doesn’t flow when a physical switch is “off”, unless there’s a transformer involved before that switch.
-If there are flakes from your non-stick pan in your food, you’re doing something horribly wrong. Like trying to use a fork to scrape food out of it.
-”All natural” doesn’t mean it’s good for you or safe. Nightshade, uranium, cyanide, lead, and ricin are all natural compounds. But can wreck your day.
The cleaning product ideas were great in my college apartment, especially because I have a cat
Great advice!
Great tips on going green. Every one thing matters…….
As a college student, these tips on Extrema cookware are very helpful for cooking in college dorms and apartments. The tips on matching your pan to your burner for quick cooking, and cleaning up fast was also helpful for fast cooking with the busy schedule I’ll have in the fall. Thanks!