Thursday, August 5, 2010

Summer Cooking

Since I’ve put the label ”summer cooking” on here I was thinking that perhaps I should explain what I mean by that.

For me, as soon as the weather gets hot it effects my cooking pretty drastically. I’m sure that anyone without central A/C is in a similar boat. I do anything I can to avoid turning on the oven and heating up the apartment. Most of my cooking is done on the stovetop or in the toaster oven. If I had a grill I would be using that and recently I conducted a successful experiment that involved setting up the slow cooker on the balcony with an extension cord (to be done only if I will be home for the duration of cooking time and there is NO chance of rain). It’s possible that using the slow cooker inside wouldn’t actually add much heat to the kitchen but I’m not ready to try that experiment yet.

It also means preparing dishes that I’ve always associated with summer, for some reason - in addition to the cold-prep tuna and chicken salads and “icebox desserts” you might expect - this involved quite a bit of pasta in my family. Maybe it’s that stovetop thing again. My favorite simple summer dinner is “Noodles and Cheese” with a side salad and lots of cucumber. This will be appearing on the blog soon along with some of those salads.

Finally, for the last three years summer cooking means that I have a garden to work with! For others this might be obvious but I’m still enjoying the novelty of having fresh herbs and tomatoes outside my door.

Does anyone else have summer cooking preferences that I've missed here?

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