Too many cooks spoil the planet

Besides the fact that they're easy to use though, there's another upside to your average microwave: they're more energy efficient. Compared to an electric oven, a microwave uses around 66% less energy to cook your food. It also takes less time to cook it, as anyone who's ever attempted to make a proper oven-baked potato will know.

Maybe it's just me, but an hour and a half is a little long to wait for something my microwave can do in seven minutes. I demand the world's most eco-friendly jacket potatoes, and I demand them now.

Admittedly, one downside to the microwave is that microwaveable tray meals come in a lot of packaging - including plastic trays, funnily enough - which themselves take a lot of energy to make. The more obvious downside though is probably the fact that I strongly suspect that microwave meals were created by someone who has in fact never seen the meals they're attempting to approximate, but has perhaps heard them described in a book somewhere.

Honestly, if I ever find anyone who cooks a spaghetti bolognaise the way it looks in a microwave tray, then I'll gladly hand over my title of worst pasta dish ever created. I might even hand over my aforementioned macaroni disaster as a prize. Like getting a wooden spoon, but now with added burnt cheese embers.

So if you want to avoid mutant oily pasta - as well as avoiding the dreaded plastic packaging - and save energy in the process then here's something you can do: when you're doing a bit of home-cooking, hopefully more successfully than I do, then make enough for two or three meals instead of one. Once it's cooked - and providing it's something edible that you can reheat - freeze it, and then reheat it in the microwave another night, so that you don't have to use up as much energy.

I've been reliably informed that this also works with the leftovers from takeaways, but don't hold me to that if you attempt to microwave last night's Efe's tomorrow morning - you will probably regret it later.

Obviously, though, there are some times when you do just have to use an oven. Vegetarian though I am, I can understand the difficulty of trying to fit a roast chicken into the microwave - especially considering the size of the ones the university supplies. Big bird; very, very small space. Leaving aside the connotations of cooking a Sesame Street character, it's just never going to happen.

When that problem does crop up, and you have to use an oven, one tip I've found is to turn it off five to ten minutes before you're due to take out whatever you're making. A closed oven stores enough leftover heat that it'll finish cooking your food the rest of the way through by itself, so you don't need to use up the extra energy to do it.

Obviously, I don't need to tell you to make sure your food's cooked when you take it out - although it probably wouldn't hurt to anyway, considering the state of what I'm sure was still a live cow that my flatmates were eating a couple of weeks ago. Once you've done that though, and seen that it works, keep at it. You can save up to 1600kw of electricity a year by turning off your oven earlier, and it'll take you no more effort than turning a knob a few minutes before you would have anyway.

Of course, most of what I've just said relies on you knowing how to cook beforehand. I'm reassured to know that if my house is anything to go by, then at least five sixths of the student body should be relatively competent at feeding themselves. If you're in the other sixth - and I can empathise with you there - then maybe you should try and convince your flatmates that they're destroying the o-zone layer if they waste energy and don't cook for both of you at once. Emotional blackmail: the highest form of environmental protection.

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