Going 'green' in the kitchen

You don't have to invest in a Prius or renounce electricity to green up your life. A new breed of “green” cookbooks advocates small but significant changes in your kitchen and your cooking habits that will increase your contribution to the earth's salvation.

Recognizing that most people will balk at drastic lifestyle changes, the books offer sober, realistic and unpretentious advice. “The Big Green Cookbook” is perhaps the most user-friendly of the bunch. Author Jackie Newgent urges aspiring greenies to find their “sustainable sweet spot” by adopting only changes they can make comfortably.

With an upbeat tone and can-do spirit, Newgent makes you want to live greener, simply because you can. She's also peppered the book with factoids — if each American household replaced just one incandescent bulb with an energy saver, it would be like taking 800,000 cars off the road — that drive home the mantra “a little can mean a lot.”

Printed entirely on recycled paper with soy-based inks, the book lays out how to reduce cooking times and modify ingredients for some favorite meals. Instead of traditional chili con carne, make Chili con Turkey (more eco-friendly than beef) and make it in the pressure cooker (saves 42 minutes of cooking time). Instead of turning on the oven, use the microwave to “bake” desserts and brown the top with a pastry torch.

The recipes are well organized, easy to prepare and generally tasty. Newgent arranges them by season to help cooks buy local, a move that will save food miles — the number of miles your food travels to reach your table (and therefore, the gallons of petroleum it gobbles). Within each season, she offers the traditional appetizer through dessert format. A summer meal of light and fragrant “Honeydew of the Sea” floats grilled mahi-mahi on a honeydew-avocado puree spiked with cayenne, cilantro and lime. A side of Veggie-Studded Sticky Quinoa offers a fresh and richly nutritious take on tabbouleh that requires only minutes of cooking time.

“The Green Kitchen” by Times of London food columnist Richard Ehrlich also offers a trove of easily applied tips. A truly engaging book “about making hundreds of small changes,” it's full of gee-whiz information. To wit: Dishwashers actually save water. Defrosting in the refrigerator provides free cooling energy, thereby cutting energy consumption. Self-cleaning ovens are more efficient than standard ovens because they are better insulated.

The book, however, is undone by its structure. The recipes appear delicious, but are arranged according to cooking method, rather than some format that might actually be useful. American cooks might also find the abundance of recipes for sausage and potatoes a bit too British.

If you're looking for a field manual rather than a cookbook, Kate Heyhoe's “Cooking Green” is for you. Using terms like “cookprint” and “ecovore,” the book is a deluge of eco-tests, facts and advice on everything from what kind of meat to buy to fuel-efficient flatbreads.

Even the recipes contain more text than instruction, including a “Green Meter,” so cooks can quantify their greenness. Basically a textbook with recipes, the tome is likely to overwhelm newcomers to green cooking. But those who seek a complete overhaul in their cooking life and philosophy will benefit from its comprehensive approach.

Mesclun Salad Pizzette With Peaches and Pecans

Adapted from Jackie Newgent's “Big Green Cookbook”

A toaster oven is perfect for these pizzas. Toaster ovens are eco-friendly, using less energy than needed to heat a larger oven. If you don't have a toaster oven, a standard oven's broiler works fine, too.

2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

2 tablespoons canola or flaxseed oil

2 medium yellow or white peaches, pitted and thinly sliced

1/2 cup thinly sliced red onion

1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste

1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

2 (8-inch) whole-wheat lavash flatbreads or pocketless pita breads

¹∕³ cup finely crumbled blue cheese

3 cups mesclun mix or chopped mixed leafy greens

1/4 cup raw pecans, chopped

In a blender, combine the vinegar, oil, a quarter of the peach slices (slices from 1/2 peach), 1/4 cup of the onion, the salt and pepper. Blend until just combined, about 15 seconds. Set aside.