Green Kitchen Become more eco-conscious at the heart of your home

Becoming more eco-conscious starts at the heart of the house, your kitchen. And it doesn’t have to involve huge change, as Claire O’mahony discovers

So much of our life is lived in the kitchen. is is where food is stored, prepped and cooked, homework gets done, chinwags are had over cups of tea and of late, the kitchen has been a home o ce. It’s a hive of activity where the choices you make have an environmental impact. at doesn’t have to mean splashing out on new energy-e cient appliances – although you could if you wanted to – or making dramatic lifestyle changes, but is more about working with what you have, to make your kitchen a more sustainable place. Here are

some easy everyday suggestions.

Find clever ways to use up leftover fruit and vegetables

Working out what to do with the unloved produce hanging around your fruit bowl and veg box can be challenging. Chef Myles Lambert of Shells Café (shellscafe.com) in Strandhill, Co Donegal, says it’s a case of thinking outside the box. “It’s really looking at what food you’re buying and how you can use it a bit better, especially when you’ve bought veg. You have great ideas, but you see it starting to turn or you’ve only used half of it and you’re not sure what to do,” he says. “For example, with fruit that won’t ripen, you can just whack it into your smoothies and freeze down the smoothie into lollies for your kids. I also love poaching hard fruit and you can keep that in your fridge for an extra two weeks.” is is the time of year when we tend to stock up leaves for salads, and Myles suggests turning le over lettuce and herbs into a multi-use oil. “In Shells Café, we always have that problem and what we do is we put it into a blender with half a cup of nice olive oil and salt and blend it all up. You can put all the stems in and old lettuce leaves and things like that. You then have a herb oil and that will last for ages. You can put it on your salads. Pesto doesn’t have to be only basil, Parmesan cheese and pine nuts; you can play around with the idea of pesto and whack it all in the blender.” Salad leaves can also be thrown into smoothies, and they’re not just for a cold green lunch. “You can do a lot more with lettuce than you think,” says Myles. “Iceberg lettuce cooked with peas with little bits of bacon is a classic dish and cooking with endive is quite interesting.” Another option is to sign up with free food sharing app, Olio, which recently launched in Ireland and allows you to connect with neighbours so you can share and not waste unwanted food.

Be energy aware

Between ovens, fridges, dishwashers and multiple other appliances, the typical use of energy in kitchens is high. But there are ways to reduce this and quick wins include putting in LED lighting, which use less electricity. “Cooking at a lower temperature can help a little bit. Also, people in Ireland boil their kettles 10 times a day. Imagine if they boiled it ve times a day. And you don’t need to reboil if you’ve put the kettle on and then went o to do something else. A 90-degree tea is just the same as a 100-degree tea,” says Myles. Pat Kane warns against using the oven to heat small things. “Can you use a microwave? Can you use the toaster? It takes time to get to whole oven to the right temperature and then you’re just taking a small food item out again and this is a waste of energy.” She also recommends doing an appliance audit and getting rid of anything you haven’t used in a year, especially if it’s sitting there on the counter, plugged in. “We try and eliminate the number of appliances we have, because we want to reduce electricity usage and we want to reduce the amount of stu we have in house unnecessarily,” she says. “Try and live with less. Do you really need the doughnut machine or all the other things that you read about in the Sunday papers?”

Skip single-use anything

Many single use items in the kitchen can be replaced with eco-friendly alternatives, and this process can start by taking a look at where the plastic in your life is. In many cases, it’s water bottles. “If you own the house or if you’re ready for the investment, get in a tap lter,” says Pat Kane. “You can also use Brita lter jugs, and charcoal sticks are perfect for water ltering – pop one in the bottle and a er an hour, the water is good to drink.” As a more eco-friendly and more aesthetically pleasing alternative to cling-film, reusable beeswax wraps, which have a shelf life of up to six months, can be used to cover and wrap food. And you don’t need kitchen towels. “Use old t-shirts, old socks, old rags which can all be washed. We have this precious idea that everything has to be matchy matchy and beautiful, but it doesn’t,” says Pat, whose preference for a reusable rag is cotton, which is biodegradable. “The point is to try to avoid stuff that can be easily replaced by reusables, because it will reduce the weight of your bin, which means you’re more likely to pay less but you’re also going to be helping the planet.”

Be a better recycler

If the lovely side of kitchen sustainability is introducing wood utensils and an assortment of Kilner jars, the unsexy side is paying more attention to what you’re binning. “Make sure your recycling is washed and it’s dry,” says Myles. “Before it goes in the bin, stop and think ‘What can I really do with this?’ In the end, a lot can be done – eggshells for example can be used in the garden.” According to Pat Kane, many items which could be composted or recycled end up in the general waste bin; o en people don’t know if certain types of packaging can be recycled. “It takes a little bit of e ort to learn, but there are great resources like mywaste.ie where you can check. Try and get into the habit of recycling everything, even if it’s the bare minimum. Recycle your cardboard, paper, rigid plastic, tins and cans.” Don’t have access to a brown bin or a composter? Pat suggests going onto the Sharewaste.com website. “You can nd a local composter here and share your compost,” she says. “Try and do the right thing with your food waste.”