In a wireless sensor network, as the sensor nodes have limited energy, it is important to minimize nodal energy consumption due to message communication to extend the network lifetime. Existing forwarding protocols either do not consider network performance and energy saving jointly, or they are not distributed. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach, called minimum consumption maximum remaining energy (MIN-MAX-E) forwarding, which combines minimum energy consumption of transmitter-receiver pair along with maximum remaining energy of the receiver in making a relay node selection decision. Extensive simulation studies show that the proposed algorithm offers a significantly improved energy saving performance with respect to the existing energy-aware approaches.