You could be using 50 percent less energy cooking than you are right now. Typical stoves have to heat up about 35 pounds of steel and around 4 cubic feet of air before it can begin cooking your food. In fact, food only absorbs about 6 percent of the heat produced by the stove.

The convection setting on your stove will save energy by circulating the hot air around.

Natural gas stoves with electric ignitions are almost twice as efficient as electric stoves because the fuel source is used directly to cook the food instead of coal being burned to produce electricity which has to travel to your house and then heat your stove.

Electric ovens with convection fans costs 30 percent less to operate than a regular electric stove.

Other ways you can reduce your stove's energy consumption:

• Don't peek at the food - every time you peek as much as 25 percent of the heat escapes. You can use the oven light, a timer, or a meat thermometer to check on the food instead.
• Put a lid on it - a lid will reduce cooking time by as much as 65 percent.
• Clean your oven - clean ovens reflect heat better than dirty ones, and more reflected heat means faster cooking.
• Preheat the oven less - only preheat when a recipe calls for it. Also you can shut the oven off 5 minutes before the food is done. The oven will be warm enough to continue to cook the food for that long.
• Use glass or ceramic - they hold the heat better than metal pans.This means you can turn down the oven as much as 25 degrees and still cook your food in the same amount of time.
• Bake larger meals - today's ovens aren't as efficient at cooking smaller meals, so cook many dishes at once.
• Keep air moving - make sure there is room for air to flow around the pans. The circulating hot air will help the foods cook faster.
• Use convection setting - it can save you up to 25 percent in cooking time.
• Get a self-cleaning oven - they have better insulation, which means they will cook your food faster and with less energy. If you clean the oven right after you are done cooking, it will use less energy to get up to the oven's cleaning temperature - 850 degrees.