Conserving in the Kitchen

One reader requested some eco-friendly tips in the kitchen, so I thought I'd comply.

The kitchen is probably the most challenging, but also the most important room to tackle. So much of our daily existence revolves around food prep, eating and then cleaning up so we can start all over again just a little while later. (Oh joy!)

When you have little mouths to feed (generally mouths that have become irritable and crabby right around 4:00 P.M.), it is so tempting to find all the ways to cut corners: disposable foil pans, frozen prepared foods, foil lined sheets - I've done them all.

Every year I try to figure out more efficient and less flustered ways to cope. The kitchen alone could make for ten blog posts, but I'll start with some food prep tips.

1) Plan your meals for the week on the weekend and make one shopping trip. This cuts down grocery store trips (saving gas and time), and you'll buy what you actually need and not extras (cutting down on wasted food - especially produce).

2) Don't be afraid to use the entire fruit or vegetable. I'm not suggesting that you serve your kids melon skin or orange peel, but in our attempt to cut down on waste, we discovered that our kids preferred broccoli stems to broccoli heads. You can peel off the outer layer of the stem and slice the stalks into sticks.

3) Keep a compost bin in your kitchen. I will post about composting in more detail at a later time, but composting food scraps enabled us to cut down to just one trash bag for an entire week.

4) Freeze, cook or compost produce that's going bad. I'll admit, I don't LOVE the taste of frozen vegetables - they definitely lose their crispness - but you don't have to eat them straight. Add frozen vegetables to all sorts of fresh dishes, like soups, lasagnas, spaghetti sauce and more. Frozen fruit is perfect for smoothies.

5) Find recipes that use as few pans as possible, cutting down on washing time (a win-win for you).

6) Consider double batch cooking. This definitely feels like more work up front, but can be a life-saver at the end of a hard day. Soups, stews, sauces, quiches, beans, and casseroles are all foods that taste just as good second time 'round. And, you will barely need to wash cooking gear afterwards.

7) Instead of using disposable pans, consider biodegradable parchment paper for baking. I hate scrubbing pans more than anything, so I recently began experimenting with natural parchment paper in baking. The paper goes right into my compost where it breaks down naturally, and the pans require almost no washing.

8) If you soak vegetables (like greens) in water, use that water for your plants rather than spilling it out. One mom I know keeps a pitcher by her sink for any left over drinking water and uses that for her plants.

9) Consider cloth napkins for school lunches and at home. We're using 30-year-old hand me down napkins that were my husband's grandmother's. My kids love the vintage prints and actually enjoy setting a "pretty" table!

10) Soak and then wash. Soaked dishes, pots and pans clean much faster and require less elbow grease. I'm still a little squeamish and insist on rinsing the grimy sink water off my pots and pans, but not everyone is. A sink full of water is far less wasteful than a running tap.

Have more ideas? Let me know!