The fifth week of a Cooking Matters class is one of my favorite lessons. This is when the conversation turns towards the food choices we make at restaurants and the grocery store. Whether we are talking with adults about shopping smart or with kids about making their own snacks at home, the fifth week of class directly empowers participants to make smart choices for their health and budgets. Even kids tend to already know, it’s cheaper and healthier to cook at home than to eat in a restaurant, get takeout, or buy prepared meals from the grocery store. Unfortunately, circumstances beyond skills and knowledge often prevent families living in poverty from making the choices they know are best.
During a recent fifth week lesson at an elementary school, I asked the kids which costs less: going out to eat or cooking at home.
“Cooking!” answered one young girl, enthusiastically. “Because it’s free!”
“But you’ve got to pay the electric,” corrected the boy sitting next to her.
Cooking, he knows, is not actually free. When a family suffers from food insecurity it is rarely the only financial challenge they face, and children in such families are not easily sheltered from the daily struggle to make ends meet.
When having trouble paying utilities, saving money on food is not always as straightforward as it seems. Sure, microwaves and ranges (whether gas or electric) do not contribute much to energy costs when compared to lighting, air conditioning, or heat. But, when every penny counts, parents must count pennies. Efficient cooking can easily save a household $30 a year. That may not seem like much, but in terms of food security, that extra $2.50 a month can buy a fresh bottle of milk, a box of cereal, or a couple boxes of pasta.
So, for those of you who, like many of our class participants, are looking to save money on your gas or electric bill, I’ve compiled some tips for energy efficient cooking:
- Try baking in the microwave. Check out goodnuke.com for some recipes, but be sure to use microwave safe cookware!
- Instead of cooking pasta and sauce on separate burners, try a one-pot meal. Some ways to do this are by cooking pasta in stock instead of water as instructed in the bottom half of this recipe or by following any of these 21 recipes! You can use similar techniques to prepare simple and efficient risottos and pilafs using rice or other grains.
- Or, forget the stove, and prepare a meal all on one sheet pan. Eating Well has some pretty excellent ideas for things that taste great while baked together at the same temperature. Don’t worry about preheating the oven, either. Unless you’re actually baking, preheating is not necessary to ensure a good result!
- Leave that oven door closed while it’s on. The oven temperature drops 25 degrees every time you open the door!
- Use ceramic or glass pans in the oven. They retain heat better than metal, meaning you can bake or roast more quickly or at a lower temperature.
- More tips for saving energy (and money) in the kitchen (including info about the biggest energy hog of them all – the refrigerator) can be found at eartheasy.com and consumerenergycenter.org.
These tactics, along with other energy-saving habits like turning off lights and other appliances when not in use, can add up to substantial savings on utility bills. Although these tips only help a family save money if that family is already in a stable housing situation with active utilities and functioning appliances, for the many families in today’s economy who are scraping by, but just barely, these small money-saving strategies could add up. Especially as we crank up our furnaces on this cold winter’s day, we’ll all benefit from budgeting our energy use as wisely as we plan our grocery list. The money saved on one’s bill may not be much, but neither is the amount saved when choosing once to cook at home instead of getting pizza. The small choices that we make, when able to make them, add up and can lead to our bills being payable and our food budgets going further towards healthy, home-cooked meals that satisfy.
-Becky Reinhart, Cooking Matters AmeriCorps Member
