At the Abergavenny Food Festival last month, I gave a joint demonstration on low-energy cooking with Jennipher Marshall-Jenkinson, chairman of the Microwave Technologies Association. My spiel was about pressure cookers. No prizes for guessing what Marshall-Jenkinson talked about.

Among the dishes she cooked was a steamed toffee pudding which took all of seven minutes (and looked and tasted great). And watching her work made me think about two semi-imminent events. One is Energy Saving Week, which runs from October 20-26. The other is Christmas. Since you may already be planning on cooking your Christmas pudding, Marshall-Jenkinson and I both plead: cook it in your microwave.

Marguerite Patten, Britain’s senior cookery writer and a long-time microwave advocate, has published a microwave Christmas pudding recipe that calls for ten minutes of cooking. According to an analysis for Defra, cooking Christmas pud on an electric hob uses somewhere between 7.5 and 10 times more electricity than cooking it in a microwave.

What does that mean for the nation? Look at it this way: for every 10,000 Christmas puddings cooked from scratch in the microwave, we eliminate around 26,000 kWh of electricity use – enough to run 250 full-size dishwashers twice a week for a year. We also save tens of thousands of litres of water. And these savings increase if the pud is then heated for serving in the microwave. Similar savings can be made cooking rather more everyday dishes such as baked potatoes in the microwave.

Learn more about Energy Saving Week at http://tinyurl.com/54d7gs. Find Patten’s recipe (and some other microwave recipes) at http://tinyurl.com/4yefx7. Marshall-Jenkinson’s excellent book Microwave Magic: The Art of 21st Century Cooking (£12.95) can be purchased at www.microwaveassociation.org.uk .

greenkitchen@thetimes.co.uk

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