Simply Superb Cooking Tips, Tricks & Recipes From A Couple's Kitchen

Cookbooks are fine, but without certain essentials, your food won't last as long, or cook up quite as well. Two products we've recently tested that may actually exceed the claims made for them, are Thermalon Green Pans and Debbie Meyer's Green Bags. You'll find links where you can check them out further underneath these descriptions.

Green Pans, in addition to being the best cookware we've ever used, are easier on the environment, taking only half the environment-taxing production process to produce that Teflon or other pans do.

Pluses: they're as light as aluminum, but give the same kind of searing and browning quality to food as cast iron or grilling.

They really do clean up as easily as they say.

They withstand heat up 850 degrees, and will go right in the oven (Teflon starts breaking down and releasing toxic substances at around 500 degrees, which is about medium on the average cooktop.) The brushed metal handles are pretty heat resistant, to a fairly high point (not straight out of the oven, of course).

They really do cook food better. Food cooks faster, since they conduct heat amazingly well, and your baked goods will come out of the oven with even browning even in the center of the crust (AMAZING PIZZA!) or cake bottom. You can oven-roast veggies and they just slide off the pan (So does pizza.).

They're very inexpensively priced, (I bought an entire eight piece set for the price of one moderately priced pan) and have a lifetime replacement warranty.

Though you won't cook as long because your food gets done faster, you'll find you really want to cook more, because recipes come out like you envision them, and the clean up is SO easy. These are a must for everyone, whether you hate to cook or love to cook, simply because they make the whole process easier and faster.

With the cost of food right now, everyone should have Debbie Meyer's Green Bags. They keep food up to four times as long--we just finished a 10 pound bag of onions yesterday that we'd had for two months (a little longer, really). They sat in the Green Bag in a bowl on the table, and only with the last one did I have to peel down farther than the very top layer--and that was only one layer.

In our climate, we normally could have expected to keep the onions for about three weeks, tops. You do need to keep a paper towel in with your refrigerated veggies and change it out every few days when it gets damp, but who cares when your food keeps up to four or five times as long?

They're also reuseable up to ten times. Between these two products, we've found we save time, and money on food, gasoline and electricity. We like cooking more, and the clean up's much easier, so we eat in more, too. Food we buy in bulk, even with just the two of us, will keep long enough for us to eat it, so we throw very little away.

With food and gas prices what they are, even if you're not into recycling, these are two things you should do for yourself and your family. Check out the links to these great goodies below.