New Grain Cooking: Barley-Brie Risotto

By Kate Heyhoe

A One-Pot, Fast and Fabulous Meal

This is one of my favorite pressure cooker recipes, and was intended to be part of Cooking Green, but we ran out of space. So I’m sharing it now. It’s a good example of the types of recipes found in the book.

This is an economical, one-pot dish, but my family loves it simply for the way it tastes: rich with creamy Brie cheese and cozy with toothy bites of barley. As a bonus, it meets all my requirements for being green: it’s meat-free, use ingredients you can buy in bulk to reduce packaging waste, and requires little cooking fuel.

For the cook, it’s a model of carefree cooking, needing only 12 minutes of active prep. And if you keep a wedge of Brie in the fridge, most of the remaining ingredients are staples or pantry-ready, so you can whip up an easy, no-brainer dinner without planning or stress. There’s almost no chopping involved, so it’s almost as fast as waiting for take-out (and perhaps more nutritious and delicious). Try it. I think you’ll like it, as a meat-free main course, side dish, or lunch.

Barley-Brie Risotto

A New Green Basics Recipe

Serves 4 as a side; 2 as a main

Green Meter:

• Green Goodness: Pressure cooker saves fuel and time. Meat-free entree or side
• Prep/Cooking Times: 12 minutes prep +30 minutes unattended
• Prime Season: All year
• Conveniences: One-pot meal, little chopping, mostly pantry ingredients

Shrink your cookprint with this meat-free main course, which my husband even prefers to traditional risotto. Toothsome, tasty barley cooks in half the usual time with a pressure cooker, and stands in for rice in this robust risotto-style dish. Brie adds a cheesy spin different from the usual Parmesan (but feel free to gild the lily with Parmesan on the side, if you like). Unless the rind is hard or tough, I leave the rind on the brie; it falls apart with heat, but you may remove it if you prefer. Domestic brie works fine in this recipe, or experiment with other types of cheeses made close to home.

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 cup pearl barley
• 1/2 onion, finely chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 2-1/2 cups vegetable broth
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce (or tamari)
• 2 teaspoons fresh rosemary, minced (optional)
• 1/4 pound brie, in small chunks
• Freshly ground black pepper

1. In a pressure cooker, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Stir in the barley. Cook 3-4 minutes, shaking the pan or stirring occasionally, until toasted. Stir in the onion and garlic. Cook until the onion softens, about 2 minutes. Slowly pour in the broth and soy sauce (they’ll splatter at first) and add the rosemary, if using.

2. Lock the lid in place. Cook over high heat and bring the cooker to full pressure. Reduce the heat to medium-low, or adjust as needed to maintain even pressure. Cook 18 minutes, remove the pan from the heat. Let the pressure drop naturally. The barley should be tender but pleasantly chewy; if not done, add more broth or water and cook a few minutes without pressure, stirring occasionally. (If not serving right away, cover the pot. Reheat before adding the Brie, thinning with more stock if the mixture seems dry.)

3. Stir the brie into the hot barley until melted and absorbed. Serve with a generous grinding of pepper.

These make me jump for joy. Electromagnetic energy drives these burners, though you need pans made of ferrous materials (like cast iron or stainless steel). They consume less than half the energy of standard coil burners, and they’re superior in cooking performance to gas or electric burners. Single induction burners make handy portable appliances, and some conventional cooktops add a separate induction burner. Details on Portable Induction Burners follow.

Portable Induction Burners:
Energy-Efficiency in a Box

Full induction cooktops, with fully-loaded price tags, are creeping into the marketplace. But a single induction burner can supplement your existing gas or electric cooktop more affordably.

Induction cooking works by sending a magnetic field through ferrous metal (as in cookware made of iron, steel, or a combination). The reaction creates heat, and it’s this heat that cooks the food. The heat is created from within the pan’s own material; think friction and fast-moving, excited molecules (like the heat generated between your hands when you rub your palms together).

The result: a near instant transfer of energy, with efficient absorption of over 90 percent of this energy (compared to around 40 percent efficiency with gas burners, and 74 percent of conventional electric burners). Plus, the cooker’s surface stays cool, very little heat is released into the kitchen, and the food can actually cook quicker. Since the cooker surface stays cool, absorbing heat only from the cooking vessel, it’s easy to clean (no stuck muck). Plus, with a nifty portable unit, I can cook anywhere there’s a plug. Like out on our wide country deck, in fresh air, with grazing deer and wild turkeys watching.

The first time I boiled pasta or fried steaks on the induction element, I noticed the differences from conventional electric or gas cooking right off the bat. The water boiled sooner, and the fry pan reached perfect searing heat in a flash. Plus, I had instant control; when I turned the dial from high to low, the unit powered down to the lower setting immediately (essentially adjusting the strength of the magnetic field). No waiting for a hot gas or electric element to slug down in speed. And you can maintain constant simmering and very low temperatures (good for melting chocolate) better with induction.

With induction, there’s no learning curve to get the cook up to speed (unlike microwave ovens or speed ovens). You do need to check your cookware: only ferrous metals are induction-compatible, but fortunately this includes everyday iron and steel based cookware. Basic rule: If a magnet sticks to the pan, it will work with induction. (This eliminates glass, copper, and purely aluminum pans.) Most portable units run between 1400 and 2000 watts, on a standard 120 volt power outlet.

For more info or to buy one, visit Fissler Cookstar Induction Pro.

Trendwatch: Less Meat is Hip

By Kate Heyhoe

Get ready: a new wave of cookbooks geared at cutting back (or cutting out) meat will soon hit the shelves. Hurrah! The reduced-meat diet is seriously catching on. Hopefully, we can all adapt the meat-free trend into our daily lifestyle, another step towards making “being green” into the new normal.

This month, I’ve picked four basic meat-free recipes to inspire you (one per week), no matter how busy you are. And I’ve got a handful of main dish recipes where only a handful of meat is used.

People ask me all the time: what are the fastest, easiest ways to go greener in the kitchen? Simple: consume less meat. Eating less meat shrinks your cookprint in big ways, reducing a whole chain of emissions that start at the farm, ride into your store, and end up at your table.

As I mention in Cooking Green, producing a single serving of beef requires more than 2600 gallons of water. Plus all the other global warming issues, like methane release and pollutants from livestock and factory farms. Plant based foods are the way to go, with loads of variety for wonderful flavor, texture, and nutrition: grains, nuts, leafy greens, root vegetables, legumes, and all the other fruits and veggies that fill our world. Don’t forget sea vegetables too, which are rich in nutrients, easy to prepare and great tasting, like my Wakame Salad.

Making a vow to eat less meat doesn’t mean committing to a total vegetarian diet, unless you want to. A meal that uses small amounts of meat as flavoring is still a great step to take if it replaces a meatier meal, where the steak, chop or chicken breast was at the center of the plate. Think fried rice, stir-fry, sausage and beans, pizza, paella, tamales, tacos and enchiladas, quiche and such.

Less is more, as they say. Gradually move from meaty meals to meat-free meals most days of the week. Cook fewer steaks and roasts, and more grains, beans and pastas. (And if you’re already a vegetarian, invite your carnivorous friends over and show them how to cook meat-free with style.) To get started, try the simple but delicious recipes below, from leading cookbook authors; they’re good templates, too, to customize with your own favorite ingredients. (And check out our archives of Pasta, Risotto and You for scads more recipes.)

DIY Basic Meat-Free Main Courses

• Hominy and Kidney Bean Chili
• Quinoa Pilaf (and Quinoa with Pecans)
• Polenta Lasagne with Spinach, Zucchini, Herbs, and Fontina
• Leek and Mushroom Strudel

Meat-Reduced and Fish Recipes

• Fish Tacos with Cucumber Salsa
• Fried Rice with Chinese Sausage
• Oregon Salmon Hash
• Pizza with White Beans, Prosciutto and Rosemary

by Kate Hehyoe

Double Up: Roasting two chickens uses about the same amount of energy as one. So roast two at the same time, enjoy one for dinner and save the other for sandwiches, tacos, or simply another meal. Freeze the meat for chicken salad.

Do the same with turkeys at Thanksgiving; after all, aren’t the leftovers the best part of the Thanksgiving dinner?

Quick Tips

Find more tips to shrink your cookprint in Kate Heyhoe’s book Cooking Green

by Kate Hehyoe

More Double Up: Two smaller, shallower baking dishes and pans cook quicker than one large one. A lasagna recipe, for instance, can be cooked in two baking dishes, and shave off about ten minutes baking time. Enjoy one casserole the first night, and save the other for reheating on another night (it will fit easier in your fridge as well).

Pie Pan Casseroles: Don’t have two baking dishes? Glass pie pans (especially deep-dish) work great as baking dish alternatives and go right into the microwave. I even simultaneously roast two small chickens or pork roasts using two glass pie pans, and save one for leftovers.

Quick Tips

Find more tips to shrink your cookprint in Kate Heyhoe’s book Cooking Green

Yippee! My book Cooking Green has gone back for a second printing—which in this era of ailing publishing is a major event. Reviewers have praised the book for its solid, well-researched content presented in a very absorbable, thought-provoking fashion (not fluffy or green-lite, but not dry or taxing either). It also won the 2009 Green Book Award for cookbooks. Discover more about Cooking Green: Reducing Your Carbon Footprint in the Kitchen, and how to shrink your own cookprint.

Which brings me to another book that often appeared with mine, as part of several Earth Day book reviews: Big Green Cookbook. Both this book and Cooking Green have the same goal: greener cooking by using fewer resources and reducing emissions. Both books tackle the subject matter well, as reviewers have said, and deserve a hot spot in the new green kitchen. But the authors take markedly different approaches.

In Big Green Cookbook, Jackie Newgent, a registered dietitian, presents a great collection of 200 recipes, each with a nutritional profile. A 37-page introduction highlights the basics of practical green cooking. Her other green tips are solid, short and snappy, scattered throughout the book as sidebars or brief textboxes. My book, Cooking Green, presents 50 green-model recipes but devotes 160 pages to understanding the hows and whys of cooking and greener strategies, and the impact, presented chapter by chapter in a logical sequence.

Cooking Green and Big Green Cookbook are really more complementary than competitive. By this I mean each book is different from the other in a good way, and each one has much to offer without duplicating the other. Taken together, the sum of the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts.

If you’re truly interested in shrinking your cookprint and shifting into a greener lifestyle, these two books will get you quickly on your way. Big Green Cookbook lives up to its promise: it’s plump with recipes, and readers can get greener tip by tip, rather than topic by topic. Cooking Green takes a more comprehensive approach: it gives you the tools you need to understand how to cook, shop, and live greener—even beyond the kitchen—so you can make your own decisions every day, in any circumstance.

As I often say, going greener is all about making choices, and in this case (and even though I could be biased), the choice on these two books should be “yes” and “yes.”

• Big Green Cookbook:
  Hundreds of Planet-Pleasing Recipes and Tips for a Luscious, Low-Carbon Lifestyle
• by Jackie Newgent
• Wiley 2009
• Paperback; 400 pages
• ISBN: 978-0-470-40449-2

Ever find you’ve accumulated way too many flimsy plastic produce bags? Stop the insanity! As I point out in Cooking Green, recycling is good, and bringing your own bags for produce as well as groceries is even better. Now, 3B Bags offers hip and practical bags for both vegetables and groceries. They make reusable, washable produce bags from fine, see-through netting. Cool!

They feature a drawstring, weigh next to nothing, and come three to a pack ($7.50). Bring them to the store in the 3B Paisley Tote ($6.00), which is made of polypropylene so it can be wiped clean, and features a clear pocket on the interior side (drop in garlic heads or a grocery list). According to the manufacturer, using three of their reusable produce bags once a week can save as many as 150 plastic bags per year. Check them out at 3BBags.com.

by Kate Hehyoe

Even if you never use the self-cleaning function, it’s a worthwhile feature. Why? Because self-cleaning ovens are better insulated than standard ovens, so less heat pours into your kitchen.

If you do use the self-cleaning feature, turn it on after your oven’s already hot, like after roasting, so you don’t waste extra fuel getting it up to inferno temperature.

Quick Tips

Find more tips to shrink your cookprint in Kate Heyhoe’s book Cooking Green

Fox News, April 21, 2009

Video of Kate’s interview
on Fox News in Austin Texas

Buy Cooking Green

Kate on The Splendid Table

Listen to Kate Heyhoe’s Interview with Lynne Rossetto Kasper on NPR’s The Spendid Table, August 1, 2009.

The Spendid Table: Complete August 1 radio show listing

Recent Reviews

“…when it comes to the green kitchen Kate Heyhoe is really the Green Goddess. A dynamic combination of Michael Pollan, Alton Brown, and Wonder Woman all rolled into one. After finishing this book you will definitely be convinced that you can help save the planet while preparing dinner every night.” —Heather Jones, ProjectFoodie.Com, July 9, 2009.

Read the full review.

“Best of all, it’s so well-written and informative that I can say confidently that it’s one of the few environmental book I’ve ever read that’s actually fun to read.

“Cooking Green is the kind of book you’ll want sitting on your shelf as a reliable resource for decades of intelligent kitchen decision-making, and it’s selling at a very reasonable $9.99 at Amazon. Use it to shrink your own carbon cookprint! —Daniel Koontz, Casual Kitchen, July 22, 2009.

Read the full review.

“Ever thought about the ‘cookprint’ of your kitchen’s pots and pans? What about the oven and microwave? A new book gives you the answers.”

Read Kate Heyhoe’s Interview with Leah Koenig on Mother Nature Network, July 15, 2009.

Washington Post, A Mighty Appetite, April 22, 2009
Earth Day Food for Thought: Shrinking Your ‘Cookprint’

by Kim O’Donnel

Excerpt:

Cookbook author Kate Heyhoe would like you to put down that organic avocado and chew on this morsel for a moment:

When it comes to being green, what you eat is not enough; how you cook it and what you cook with are equally essential to the green equation.

On the first page of her new book, “Cooking Green,” Heyhoe tells us right up that “appliances account for 30 percent of our household energy use, and the biggest guzzlers are in the kitchen.” (She refers to the oven as the “Humvee of the kitchen.”)

As we talk about reducing our carbon footprint on this Earth Day—and going forward—Heyhoe, who’s based in Austin, Tex., would like us to consider shrinking our “cookprint” as well – the energy it takes to prepare food every day. In the interview notes below, she explain what the heck that newfangled word means and how the electric kettle can be your new best friend.

Read the full interview at Shrinking Your ‘Cookprint’.

Consumer Reports 05/15/09
Buzzword: Cookprint

by Daniel DiClerico

What it means.

Cookprint takes the carbon footprint—the amount of greenhouse gas each of us generates through our daily activities—and plants it firmly in the kitchen.

Food writer Kate Heyhoe cooked up cookprint, defined as the energy needed to prepare the food you eat. That energy use encompasses the appliances and techniques used to prepare and store food, though the management of leftovers and food waste also factors in—you lower your cookprint by composting rather than tossing scraps into the trash. Low-cookprint meals should also be heavy on plant-based and locally grown, sustainable foods.

Why the buzz? A few new cookbooks—including Heyhoe’s Cooking Green: Reducing Your Carbon Footprint in the Kitchen—the New Green Basics Way; Big Green Cookbook: Hundreds of Planet-Pleasing Recipes and Tips for a Luscious, Low-Carbon Lifestyle, by Jackie Newgent; and Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, by Mark Bittman—have stirred up interest in eco-conscious cooking.

Besides food enthusiasts, appliance manufacturers are in on the cookprint movement, though it’s worth noting that cooking appliances as a category account for just 3 percent of a home’s energy consumption, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Whirlpool says that for its induction appliances, “90% of the energy [is] expended into useful heat to reduce utility costs. (With gas ranges up to 60% of the heat is normally wasted through indirect gas combustion.)”

Read more at ConsumerReports.org

2009 Green Book Festival Names Winners

LOS ANGELES (April 20, 2009) _ The 2009 Green Book Festival has named “Cooking Green” by Kate Heyhoe the top winner in the Cookbooks category.

2009 Green Book Festival

Denver Post, April 22, 2009
Green day: Five ways to shrink your “cookprint”

By Tucker Shaw, Food Editor

Excerpt:

We’ve all heard about the toxic emissions spewing from our gas-guzzling automobiles. But according to Kate Heyhoe, author of the new book “Cooking Green”, the average single-family home accounts for twice as much greenhouse gas per year as the average sedan. And the kitchen is a hot zone.

There are hosts of products out there to help you turn your kitchen into an eco-friendly entity: Super-insulated refrigerators, induction cooktops, in-home composters, organic cleaning products.

These are all good ideas — if you have the money to spend on them.

But it doesn’t have to cost you much time or effort — or any money at all — to reduce your cooking footprint (or as Heyhoe calls it, your “cookprint”) and your utility bill.

All it really takes is a little common sense and a touch of elbow grease.

Here are five cheap, easy ways to make your kitchen greener and save cash…

Read Five ways to shrink your “cookprint”

The Providence Journal, April 22, 2009
Eco-smart tips and recipes help reduce your ‘cookprint’

By Gail Ciampa, Food Editor

Excerpt:

Cooking Green: Reducing Your Carbon Footprint in the Kitchen the New Green Basics Way (Lifelong Books, $17.95) by Kate Heyhoe is almost two books in one. The first half is devoted to explaining why you need to make a green commitment and then how to reduce your “cookprint.” Don’t you love that word? Let’s use it often…. There are also techniques such as passive blanching (including using the microwave), which make so much sense and are so easy, you won’t believe you ever did things a different way.

Read Eco-smart tips and recipes

Scientific American, November 5, 2009
Shrink Your “Cookprint”

By Dawn Stover

Many foods don’t need sustained boiling to cook. For example, hard “boiled” eggs can be made by placing the eggs in a covered pot of water, bringing it to a full boil, then turning off the burner. In 20 minutes the eggs will be done. Known as passive cooking, this on-and-off technique not only saves energy but can also help avoid overcooking vegetables such as corn on the cob. For more tips see the new book Cooking Green: Reducing Your Carbon Footprint in the Kitchen by Kate Heyhoe (Da Capo Press, 2009), or visit www.newgreenbasics.com.

Read Being Green: 10 Earth-Friendly Habits You Can Adopt

Planet Green at Discovery.com, April 21, 2009
Read Cooking Green for Great Info to Green Your Kitchen

Book review of the new book by Kate Heyhoe

By Kelly Rossiter

Excerpt:

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…

Read the full Book review of the new book by Kate Heyhoe.

epicurious, April 20, 2009
Eco-Friendly Cookbooks for Earth Day

by Lauren Salkeld

Excerpt:

We all know that buying organic, local, sustainable food can be better for the environment, but a crop of new books is making the case that when it comes to eco-conscious eating, it’s time to do more…

…cookbook author Kate Heyhoe uses a buzzword to express the place where eco-consciousness meets good food. Her new book, Cooking Green, is about reducing your “cookprint,” which is the environmental impact of your cooking and eating, and is affected not only by the food you buy but how you prepare it, how you clean up, how much waste is created, even how you store and use leftovers. With this in mind, Heyhoe starts with the kitchen, covering topics such as making oven cooking more energy-efficient, conserving water, and greener outdoor grilling. She follows this with advice for eco-conscious cooking methods, and then dives into ingredients and preventing waste. The recipe section aims to help you make your favorites (lasagne, roast chicken, cornbread) in “new and greener ways.” Each recipe comes with a “green meter” to highlight the way it saves fuel and water, and how it converts conventional cooking methods to planet-friendly ones. Cooking Green is not exactly light reading, but that’s why I like it. Rather than just tell you what to do, Heyhoe explains why you should do so.

Read the full article at Eco-Friendly Cookbooks for Earth Day

NPR Cincinnati Edition, 91.7 WVXU

Interview with Kate Heyhoe
Podcast, April 19, 2009

Field Notes: Biodiversity Project, The Work, Cooking Green, Madisono’s, Focus on Technology Media files

Full podcast

Kate’s interview segment

Buy Cooking Green

Cooking Green:
Reducing Your Carbon Footprint in the Kitchen
the New Green Basics Way

• About the Book
• Author Interview
• Praise Quotes

• Recipes

  • One-Pot Prep: Potatoes and Green Beans
  • Toasted Garlic Trout with Lime
  • Greek Citrus-Honey Cake

About Kate

Getting the LEDs In and Out

By Kate Heyhoe

LEDs are “in” and it’s time to get the word out about their energy-saving profile. Unlike compact fluorescent bulbs, they don’t contain mercury and they’re even more energy efficient. And if you use a MacBook Air (like me), you’re seeing this by the light of an LED screen.

LED stands for light emitting diode, and everything from traffic lights, billboards, automotive running lights, laptop computers and TVs are increasingly beaming with LEDs. So are countries and municipalities, including the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Technology advancements mean consumers will soon be using LEDs even more routinely.

Sapphire, it seems, is the secret behind 90 percent of LEDs, though these sapphires don’t look quite like the gemstone on your finger. One company, Rubicon Technology, provides most of the world’s sapphire substrates used in the LED chips, and recently announced its process for manufacturing the “super boule,” a 400-pound sapphire crystal that can produce large volumes of LEDs. Their improvements in sapphire wafer size, brightness and yield mean LEDs will become more widespread in residential lighting, laptop screens, smart phones, and other applications.

LED Advantages:

• Low energy consumption – residential LED lighting uses 75% less energy
• Long life—LED lighting lasts 25 times longer than incandescents
• No infrared or ultraviolet radiation—excellent for outdoor use because UV light attracts bugs and LEDs don’t
• Environmentally sound—LEDs contain no mercury and remain cool to the touch
• Versatile—Fully dimmable (most CFLs are not), with directional light distribution

Laptop and Lighting Facts:

• According to the U.S. Department of Energy, 22 percent of the electricity used in the U.S. powers lighting. And 9% of a household’s energy costs are related to lighting
• The typical American home has 40 sockets for light bulbs
• Notebooks typically require around 65 LED chips. Dell is currently transitioning all laptop LCDs to LED backlights. Apple already uses LED backlights for MacBook Air. Industry analysts predict market penetration will reach 50 percent by 2010.
• LED television sales are predicted to reach 32 million screens in 2015, up from estimates of 2 million in 2009 and 7 million in 2010, according to Samsung.

So keep LEDs on your radar. They’re coming soon to a screen (or a lamp) near you.