Cooking Up A Few Good Green Reasons Why You Should Dust Off Your Crock Pot

Who likes coming home at the end of the night and contemplating what to feed their family when the temptation to fend for yourself by pouring some cereal in a bowl and eating it in bed becomes especially strong?

Alas, whether you have to attend to the needs of just you and your significant other AND/OR a whole brood of children on top of that, chances are that cereal is just NOT going to cut it.

Enter the humble Crock Pot...aka the slow cooking device --  a simple insulated chamber that you can plug into the wall, fill with a hodge-podge of raw and crunchy ingredients, cover, and forget about for 7 - 8 hours.

When you revisit the dutiful cooking device, a miracle awaits, for within you will discover a hearty and seductive porridge that will warm the cockles of your esophagus and tickle the pallates of your family members all shades of the rainbow.

They'll think that you're a fantastic gourmet chef when in fact you require absolutely no special training at all to flick on the "power" dial.

For all of the enormous benefits of Crock Pot cooking -- namely: convenience, budgetary savings, health, ideal for busy schedules, keeps you OUT of the fast food palaces, eliminates extraneous packaging and waste -- have you ever wondered just how GREEN a device plugged into the wall for 8 hours can really be?

It turns out that it's a lot more eco-friendly than you'd imagine!

Bearing in mind that a typical slow cooker uses 100 watts of electricity when operating on the "high" setting, if the average kilowatt hour costs about 8 cents, The California Energy Commission suggests that just 6 cents will be spent on electricity using a Crock Pot for a whopping 7 hours (as opposed to 16 cents spent using a conventional oven for just 1 hour at 350 degrees).

Furthermore, according to Planet Green: "When compared to a conventional oven which uses 2.7 pounds of CO2 for one hour of use, a slow cooker uses .9 pounds of CO2 for seven hours of use."

Whether you reach for a slow cooker to reduce your environmental impact or fulfill your lazy cooking instincts, it's green...anyway you slice it.

Okay...so perhaps going "vegetarian" or "raw" would be even MORE squeaky green, but if you lack the constitution or desire to take either step, just know that plunking a bunch of kitchen sink ingredients in your Crock Pot is a positive green step in the right direction.

What are your experiences with this fail-safe culinary device? Are you a believer?