Last weekend, we were doing some pre-spring housecleaning, trying to establish a bit of order in the house before great outside weather arrives, and I at long last attacked the bookshelf in my kitchen.

What, you don't have a kitchen bookshelf?

I pulled out two overstuffed file folders full of recipes I've printed out over the years. I realized I've never made most of them more than once. Being a meat guy, most of them are things like marinades, roasts, barbecue rubs and various other very simple mixtures. Most of them had six or seven ingredients at most and very brief instructions. I could have jotted them down in a few seconds on a piece of scrap paper.

Instead, I'd printed them out on a full sheet of paper. There were at least 300 sheets of paper in the folders, and most of them were trash.

Fortunately, my community has expanded its curbside recycling recently to accept things like printer paper, so they went into the recycle bin. But at best, that was still an imperfect solution.

I have, however, come up with a better one. I now have a scratch pad from the pile of free ones sent to me by various cookbook publishers and food companies next to my printer. If a recipe catches my eye, I take half a minute and jot down the pertinent details, then bookmark the Web page. After I make the dish, if I decide it needs to be part of my permanent collection, I'll go back and print it out and put it in a binder.

Am I going to save the world doing this? Of course not. Am I going to save a tree or three? I would certainly hope so.

While we're talking kitchen "greening," how's your compost heap? If you live in a house, you should have one. Even you apartment dwellers with patios or balconies can get small "barrel" composters made specifically for kitchen waste like vegetable trimmings, coffee grounds and the like. A staggering amount of the material that goes into your local landfill could easily be going into compost heaps instead. And once you've seen what an addition of well-made compost will do for everything from houseplants to vegetable gardens, you'll wonder why you haven't been doing it for years. Our friend Google can even bring you the method for making compost "tea," a supercharged nutrient drink that will make your plants get up and dance.

Look at how you do things in your kitchen. I'm willing to bet there are a lot of things you can do to clean (and green) up your act.

Going green isn't just a fad, it is really a way to save the planet, one step at a time.

Got a question? Comment? Topic you'd like to see covered? Drop me a line, anytime!