Week Seventeen--Greening Your Cooking

Now that it's gotten warm outside, one of my favorite ways to cook dinner is to use our gas grill. It's so easy to marinate chicken breasts during the day and then throw them on the grill around dinner time for a quick-and-easy dinner. But I've always wondered if grilling was a green cooking option?

According to the Sierra Club, it is. In fact, your best grilling option is a propane-powered outdoor grill. It is supposedly the cleanest-burning grill type out there. Electric grills are a fine green option, too. What's not a great green grilling idea is a grill or barbecue that uses charcoal. Not only is the charcoal a culprit in increasing your carbon footprint, but so is the lighter fluid that you inevitably have to squirt on the coals to get them to become red hot and ripe for cooking.

Let's say that you're not interested in cooking outdoors or it's not an option based on where you live. Then if you want to cook in the most energy-efficient and eco-friendly manner, I would recommend turning to your microwave.

Believe it or not, your microwave uses the least amount of cooking energy in your kitchen. (Plus, vegetables steamed in a microwave lose fewer nutrients than those steamed on the stovetop. Why? This New York Times article says that it's because microwave ovens use less heat and shorter cooking times than stovetops. Interesting.)

Your next best cooking option, as far as energy is concerned, is your Crock-Pot or slow cooker. I don't know about you, but I sort of have a mental block about using the slow cooker in warm weather. I associate it with winter comfort foods, not summer dishes. Nonetheless, if you're looking to cut your energy use, maybe you shouldn't moth-ball your slow cooker once winter is over.

For a rundown on how much energy each kitchen appliance uses, check out this chart on the Mr. Electricity website. You'll see that, overall, cooking doesn't use a ton of energy in the big picture, but if you really want to green how you cook your meals, every little change you can make can help.