You’ve probably heard how difficult and time-consuming it is to cook risotto. The 30-40 minutes of constant attention, the endless stirring, the repeated ladling of hot stock. Some people even insist that you stir only in one direction.

If you choose to keep up the hard work, fine; if not, consider pressure-cooking risotto. It involves around 5 minutes of work, followed by 5 minutes of listening to the radio while the rice cooks by itself. It uses around a fifth of the energy of the ladle-stir-ladle-stir method and reduces washing up. And it gives excellent results with even less work than my other favourite risotto method: the microwave. (I’ll save that for another day.)

The essence of the process: use liquid and rice in a 2:1 ratio, and cook for 5 minutes once the pot has reached full pressure. Vent the steam immediately, remove lid. Stir. Leave with lid slightly ajar to finish cooking for 2-3 minutes. Tough, eh? Sometimes, saving fossil-fuel energy means saving your own energy, too.

If you think that bit of verdancy is easy, check out this. Ages ago, my friend and colleague Aggie MacKenzie told me you can cook pasta as follows. Bring water to the boil, put in pasta, stir and bring back to the boil, cover the pot and turn the heat off. The pasta, she said, would be ready in the time specified on the packet.

I didn’t get round to trying Aggie’s method till my hands fell upon a copy of a new book called 50 Ways to Save Water & Energy by Siân Berry (Kyle Cathie, £5.99). Ms Berry uses the same method, and that reminded me to try it on some penne.

It worked exactly as promised. Aggie and Siân were right. So much for another old chestnut of Italian cookery: “Cook pasta in rapidly boiling water,” etc, etc. Turns out that the water doesn’t have to be boiling at all, as long as there’s a lid over it. Sometimes it is easy being green.

green.kitchen@thetimes.co.uk

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