Beating the Heat of Cooking in Summer
When it is over 90 degrees for several days in a row, the last thing I want to do is heat up the whole house by baking a chicken or running the oven.
This is when I lean into easy meals, planned leftovers, and cooking methods that do not turn my kitchen into a furnace.
A few things that help:
- Air fryer meals: Bacon in the air fryer for BLTs is absolutely priceless on a hot night. Add chips, fruit, cucumber salad, or a little pasta salad and dinner is handled.
- Stir-fries: Fast, flexible, and a great way to use whatever vegetables are ready in the garden or hanging around in the refrigerator.
- Crock pots and electric roasters: Plug them in outside on the deck or porch when possible. You still get a cooked meal without heating up the house.
- Grill extra food: If the grill is already on, make extra chicken, burgers, sausage, or vegetables. Tomorrow’s dinner can become wraps, chicken salad, fried rice, quesadillas, or a big salad.
- Cook early: Make your bigger meal in the morning before the house heats up, then reheat only what you need later.
- Planned leftovers: This is not the week to cook from scratch every single night. A cooked chicken can become sandwiches, salads, tacos, pasta salad, or chicken-and-rice bowls.
- Cold meals count as dinner: Egg salad, chicken salad, tuna salad, sandwiches, wraps, pasta salad, bean salads, fruit, cheese, crackers, and garden vegetables can make a perfectly good meal.
- Use the garden: Tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, herbs, greens, and whatever else is coming in can carry a lot of summer meals without much cooking at all.
- Keep no-cook backups handy: Tortillas, bread, canned beans, cheese, deli meat, boiled eggs, fruit, and salad ingredients mean you are less likely to give up and spend money on takeout.
Hot-weather cooking does not have to mean expensive takeout or sweating over the stove. Sometimes the smartest dinner is a BLT made with air-fryer bacon and a tomato that actually tastes like summer.
