Read Cooking Green for Great Info to Green Your Kitchen

I'm always interested in making my kitchen a greener place. Sometimes that takes the form of changing the way I use appliances, like using a crock pot, or experimenting with cooking pasta, or even just buying local produce. But I must confess that I've always done it in a rather haphazard rather than systematic way.

After reading through Cooking Green by Kate Heyhoe, I'm looking at my kitchen in a whole new way. She talks about defining your "cookprint" from the garden or farm your food comes from, to the packaging it comes in, to the way you choose to cook it, to how you store the leftovers, all the way down to how you clean up when you are done. She breaks the kitchen down to five zones, cold, (refrigerators and freezers, hot (cooking appliances) , wet (sinks and water heaters), dry (work areas, cupboards and lighting) and outdoors (barbeques and solar cooking). She then goes through each zone and works her way through the most energy efficient ways to use each zone.

This book is filled with common sense information that anyone can use. Some tips are really simple, like bring foods to room temperature before putting them in the oven, some are more complex, like whether or not you should use teflon-style skillets. There is lots of material on how to cook more efficiently, such as choosing foods that require little or no cooking. Then there are fifty recipes in the back of the book, each with it's own "green meter" that tells you why it's green, the prep and cooking time, the season to make it, conveniences, such as making something ahead, and what Heyhoe calls new green basic, which tells you how you can change your old habits in regards to the recipe. The writing is authoritative, without ever being bossy or overbearing. If you are interested in greening your kitchen, there is plenty of food for thought in this book.

You'll find most of the recipes in this book have few ingredients, and they all look quite easy to make. I have to confess that I totally changed the main ingredient in the recipe I tried, but it was still really good. I wanted to make Miso Brined Pork Loin Chops. I rarely buy meat in a grocery store and I couldn't bring myself to buy the pork they had because it just didn't look great. I decided it would work just as well with tofu, but the only tofu they had was fruit flavoured. So after all that, I ended up making the recipe with chicken. I also tossed the marinade into the pan and cooked it to make a sauce, but the chicken was very moist and quite tasty even without it. Here is the recipe as it was meant to be.

Miso Brined Pork Loin Chops

1-1/2 cups water

1/4 cup white miso

1 tbsp molasses

3-4 lbs boneless pork loin, sliced into chops, about 1 inch thick

1-2 tbs vegetable oil or olive oil

1.Combine water, miso and molasses in a large measuring cup or bowl, stirring untiil the miso is completely dissolved. Submerge the chops in the brine. Refrigerate in the brine for 2 hours.

2.Remove the chops from the brine and blot dry. Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a large grill pan or skillet over medium high heat. Add the chops and cook 3 to 4 minutes per side, turning once. If necessary, cook in batches. Chops are done when browned on the outside and the centre is still pale pink. Let rest 5 minutes before serving.

Difficulty Level: Easy