Have you ever thought about reducing your carbon footprint? How about in your kitchen?
It turns out that we spend, on average, over one third of our household’s electricity in the kitchen. Low carbon cooking can help reduce the energy spent here, making the environment a little bit better.
To help us home chefs become more aware of how we are using energy, Good Energy, the UK’s only 100% renewable electricity supplier, has teamed up with Chef Arthur Potts Dawson to create the Good Energy Good Kitchen guide.
The guide pairs green tips about what food to buy and how to store food with seasonal recipes, all of them green and eco-friendly. For the fall, the guide offers a recipe for ham and apple pie, as well as sweetcorn, chilli and coriander griddle cakes. For the winter, there are notable recipes like braised chicken with sweet potato and thyme and a lemon and ricotta cake.
While being low-carbon, these recipes are also quite tasty—no surprise as they have come from Chef Dawson. Dawson has had over 21 years of experience running two sustainable restaurants, Acorn House in King’s Cross and Water House in Hoxton. He also runs The People’s Supermarket, his people’s collective that is the antithesis of Tescos.
To help our readers become greener gourmets, we’ve snagged some interesting tips from the Good Energy Good Kitchen guide.
- Don’t open the oven door when your food is cooking—this drops the temperature and uses more energy to bring it back up.
- Use lids on pots when cooking to trap the heat and save three times the energy used by an open pot.
- Bake multiple items at once to utilise as much of the heat produced as possible.
- If you have time, use a slow-cooker and spend over 40% less energy than you would using an oven.
- Don’t cook! Give your stove the night off and prepare a dish that doesn’t require any cooking at all. (We reckon this could also mean treat yourself to dinner at a restaurant…)
For a copy of Good Energy Good Kitchen, email customeradmin@goodenergy.co.uk, or click here.
Written by Meghan Perri
Date posted: 05/11/2011
Category: News.
Tags: acorn house, Chef Arthur Potts Dawson, cooking, energy, Good Energy, Good Energy Good Kitchen, green, guide, london, low-carbon, recipes, save energy, sustainable dining, sustainable restaurants, tips, water house.
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