Healthy Meals and Low Carbon Cooking Tips

I have two cookbooks that focus on planet friendly, green living, low-carbon cooking.  One of them is called The Big Green Cookbook ,  In it, there are some great tips for cooking green. Here are a few:

Low Carbon Cooking

• Try to use every edible part of the produce, skin seeds and all.  I actually watched them do this at a Costco Demo of the Blendtec.  They put the entire apple in the blender.  Seeds, peel, everything! Just make sure you scrub the skin before you eat.
• Keep a lid on it.  Even when a recipe does not call for a lid, while boiling, simmering, or sautéing, if you put a lid on and turn of the burner, your food will continue to cook without wasting energy.
• Cut more, cook less.  The more you cut things, the less time it takes to cook them, using less energy.
• Room temperature= eco temperature.  Unless a recipe calls specifically for something chilled, ingredients at room temperature will cook faster that starting with cold ingredients.

What I’ve gathered from what I read, is the best thing we can do while cooking, is to use shorter cooking times and spend less energy heating and cooling things off.  And let’s be honest, what mom couldn’t use a few, easy and fast recipes!  So, for the recipes this week, we’re going to cook one or two rotisserie chickens at the beginning of the week, and portion it out for our family meals.  The rest of the meals, either no cooking, or under 20 minutes of stove or oven time.

So, without further ado, here is our GREEN MENU PLAN!

• $150 to give away!
• A special Food Pyramid Post, that literally I can’t wait to post because I spent all afternoon creating it!
• Also:  I’d love your daily vote in the California Raisin Contest .
• As always, head over to the meal plan archives for a printable version of this meal plan.