It’s HOT. For those of you outside the Pacific Northwest, those of us here are bragging that yesterday, July 29th 2009, set new records for hottest temperature recorded ever -- not just on that date but ever -- in Seattle, Portland and Vancouver.
A lot of people are miserable. For one thing, most houses and buildings around here have no air conditioning. For another, people seem to get used to the weather wherever they are, so that 105°F feels hotter somewhere it doesn’t happen too often than it does in places where it’s the norm. Plus, Seattleites love to kvetch, and the hot weather is a perfect reason.
I’ve been enjoying it immensely. The upside of not finding summer work in a down economy is that I’ve been spending my days either working on my writing somewhere pleasant or enjoying the outdoors. These 100°ish days are perfect days for basking in the shade, running into cold Puget Sound and various warmer lakes, and sleeping outdoors.
What it’s not perfect weather for is cooking. I put the oven on the other day long enough to bake a small dish of potatoes, onion and cream, and the whole house felt like it could be used for baking. So, what to eat during hot weather?
Eating out is an option if you can afford it, and the Thai food my friends and I enjoyed in an air conditioned restaurant the other night was a welcome break. But here are several other ideas for eating without turning on your stove.
Click
here if you’re viewing this in an RSS feed and want to be able to see the pictures.
Eight Heat Wave Food Ideas
Fennel Cherry Tomato Salad
The fresh taste of fennel and sweet acidity of tomatoes perfectly balance each other in this light-flavored, easy salad.
2 bulbs fresh fennel
1 pint very sweet cherry tomatoes
juice of 1 meyer lemon
olive oil (about 1/2 cup)
1-2 tablespoons dijon mustard
black pepper to taste
Slice fennel into thin strips about an inch or less long. Slice cherry tomatoes in half
In a bowl, beat together olive oil and mustard until mustard emulsifies. Add lemon juice and black pepper and stir.
Mix in fennel and tomatoes and serve.
Alternative: use apple cider vinegar instead of lemon juice. Rockridge Orchards makes a particularly nice local apple cider vinegar.
Eggs (or other foods) cooked in/on a car
Hot enough to fry an egg? I had to find out. We took a lightweight frying pan, a lid, two eggs, a spatula, and some butter down to Carkeek Park yesterday.
First, we put the pan on the hood, covered it, and left the eggs while we went to swim in the frigid waters of Puget Sound. But when we came back, the eggs were still uncooked. I had heard that mirrors and magnifying glasses can help but I left mine at home.
Amanda pointed out that her car gets really hot inside, so we stuck the pan on the dashboard, covered it, and went back to swim. When we returned, after probably half an hour, we had perfectly cooked eggs, somewhere halfway between baked and fried. Even the yolks were firm.
There’s apparently an entire book about cooking on a car, called
Manifold Destiny: The One! the Only! Guide to Cooking on Your Car Engine! If anyone out there owns the book, I’d love to know what you think of it (and what you’ve cooked in/on your car!). I think it’s hilarious and wonderful that such a book exists.
Oh, and for the record, we tried putting the pan on hot asphalt. The butter melted, but I don’t think it would have worked for cooking. Maybe if we’d had mirrors and magnifying glasses, but it was much nicer to spend our time in the water and let the car do the work for us.
Solar Oven Cooking
I’m getting tempted by this weather to build a simple solar oven. The internet is full of plans for them. Check out
this ultra-simple one made primarily from cardboard boxes and aluminum foil and
this neat one made of cob. Cooking in a solar oven generally takes much longer than cooking in a regular oven but, of course, it uses no electricity and can be done outside your house without heating things up.
Cucumbers with Smoked Salmon and Ricotta
Simplicity is key in hot weather and this dish is very simple and cooling.
Cucumbers
Ricotta (or you can use goat cheese)
Smoked Salmon
Optional: fresh dill or fennel leaves, lemon juice, black pepper
Slice cucumbers. Add dabs of ricotta on each slice. Crumble smoked salmon on each slice. Add dill or fennel, lemon juice and/or black pepper if you so choose. Eat, preferably on a blanket in the shade.
Raspberry Lemonade
My roommate brought home from California a bag of gorgeous, deeply-flavored lemons
Three things I’ve learned about lemonade: 1. It doesn’t need a lot of sweetener to be delicious; it’s better when it tastes like lemons than sugar. 2. Adding another element to it, usually another fruit or an herb, makes it wonderful. 3. Adding a pinch of salt to it also improves the flavor and helps you get electrolytes.
Other variation favorites of mine are: blackberry lemonade, rosemary lemonade, basil lemonade, lemon balm lemonade, and cherry lemonade. But raspberry is my favorite this summer.
1 quart jar
Juice of 2 meyer lemons
Large handful of raspberries
Dollop of honey or maple syrup
Large pinch of salt
Water
Mix the above ingredients. Beat with a fork or immersion blender. Add ice if you like.
Berries, Peaches and Cream or Yogurt
Few things make me happier in the summer than a bowl of yogurt and raspberries. Unless, of course, it’s a bowl of raspberries, blueberries, peaches and yogurt. The same concept works beautifully with cream, too.
If you don’t know what to eat and you’re too hot and tired to think about it, a bowl of yogurt and berries is a pretty instant and cheap meal with good fats and sweet flavors.
Homemade Pickles (and other fermented foods)
Food ferments faster in summer, so it’s a good time to make those favorites like
pickles and
sauerkraut. Don’t forget to add a little more salt than usual in hot weather, and make sure you use filtered water, since chlorine can interfere with fermentation.
Summertime Tomato Salad
This is another old favorite. It’s my mother’s recipe. I remember eating this on a hot summer night in New York when we were in Central Park on the Great Lawn for a nighttime concert of the New York Philharmonic. Lying on a blanket in warm air with my favorite summertime salad; it’s a memory the flavor still brings back today.
I’ve previously posted the recipe; you can find it
here.
A lot of people are miserable. For one thing, most houses and buildings around here have no air conditioning. For another, people seem to get used to the weather wherever they are, so that 105°F feels hotter somewhere it doesn’t happen too often than it does in places where it’s the norm. Plus, Seattleites love to kvetch, and the hot weather is a perfect reason.
I’ve been enjoying it immensely. The upside of not finding summer work in a down economy is that I’ve been spending my days either working on my writing somewhere pleasant or enjoying the outdoors. These 100°ish days are perfect days for basking in the shade, running into cold Puget Sound and various warmer lakes, and sleeping outdoors.
What it’s not perfect weather for is cooking. I put the oven on the other day long enough to bake a small dish of potatoes, onion and cream, and the whole house felt like it could be used for baking. So, what to eat during hot weather?
Eating out is an option if you can afford it, and the Thai food my friends and I enjoyed in an air conditioned restaurant the other night was a welcome break. But here are several other ideas for eating without turning on your stove.
Click here if you’re viewing this in an RSS feed and want to be able to see the pictures.
Eight Heat Wave Food Ideas
Fennel Cherry Tomato Salad
The fresh taste of fennel and sweet acidity of tomatoes perfectly balance each other in this light-flavored, easy salad.
2 bulbs fresh fennel
1 pint very sweet cherry tomatoes
juice of 1 meyer lemon
olive oil (about 1/2 cup)
1-2 tablespoons dijon mustard
black pepper to taste
Slice fennel into thin strips about an inch or less long. Slice cherry tomatoes in half
In a bowl, beat together olive oil and mustard until mustard emulsifies. Add lemon juice and black pepper and stir.
Mix in fennel and tomatoes and serve.
Alternative: use apple cider vinegar instead of lemon juice. Rockridge Orchards makes a particularly nice local apple cider vinegar.
Eggs (or other foods) cooked in/on a car
Hot enough to fry an egg? I had to find out. We took a lightweight frying pan, a lid, two eggs, a spatula, and some butter down to Carkeek Park yesterday.
First, we put the pan on the hood, covered it, and left the eggs while we went to swim in the frigid waters of Puget Sound. But when we came back, the eggs were still uncooked. I had heard that mirrors and magnifying glasses can help but I left mine at home.
Amanda pointed out that her car gets really hot inside, so we stuck the pan on the dashboard, covered it, and went back to swim. When we returned, after probably half an hour, we had perfectly cooked eggs, somewhere halfway between baked and fried. Even the yolks were firm.
There’s apparently an entire book about cooking on a car, called Manifold Destiny: The One! the Only! Guide to Cooking on Your Car Engine! If anyone out there owns the book, I’d love to know what you think of it (and what you’ve cooked in/on your car!). I think it’s hilarious and wonderful that such a book exists.
Oh, and for the record, we tried putting the pan on hot asphalt. The butter melted, but I don’t think it would have worked for cooking. Maybe if we’d had mirrors and magnifying glasses, but it was much nicer to spend our time in the water and let the car do the work for us.
Solar Oven Cooking
I’m getting tempted by this weather to build a simple solar oven. The internet is full of plans for them. Check out this ultra-simple one made primarily from cardboard boxes and aluminum foil and this neat one made of cob. Cooking in a solar oven generally takes much longer than cooking in a regular oven but, of course, it uses no electricity and can be done outside your house without heating things up.
Cucumbers with Smoked Salmon and Ricotta
Simplicity is key in hot weather and this dish is very simple and cooling.
Cucumbers
Ricotta (or you can use goat cheese)
Smoked Salmon
Optional: fresh dill or fennel leaves, lemon juice, black pepper
Slice cucumbers. Add dabs of ricotta on each slice. Crumble smoked salmon on each slice. Add dill or fennel, lemon juice and/or black pepper if you so choose. Eat, preferably on a blanket in the shade.
Raspberry Lemonade
My roommate brought home from California a bag of gorgeous, deeply-flavored lemons
Three things I’ve learned about lemonade: 1. It doesn’t need a lot of sweetener to be delicious; it’s better when it tastes like lemons than sugar. 2. Adding another element to it, usually another fruit or an herb, makes it wonderful. 3. Adding a pinch of salt to it also improves the flavor and helps you get electrolytes.
Other variation favorites of mine are: blackberry lemonade, rosemary lemonade, basil lemonade, lemon balm lemonade, and cherry lemonade. But raspberry is my favorite this summer.
1 quart jar
Juice of 2 meyer lemons
Large handful of raspberries
Dollop of honey or maple syrup
Large pinch of salt
Water
Mix the above ingredients. Beat with a fork or immersion blender. Add ice if you like.
Berries, Peaches and Cream or Yogurt
Few things make me happier in the summer than a bowl of yogurt and raspberries. Unless, of course, it’s a bowl of raspberries, blueberries, peaches and yogurt. The same concept works beautifully with cream, too.
If you don’t know what to eat and you’re too hot and tired to think about it, a bowl of yogurt and berries is a pretty instant and cheap meal with good fats and sweet flavors.
Homemade Pickles (and other fermented foods)
Food ferments faster in summer, so it’s a good time to make those favorites like pickles and sauerkraut. Don’t forget to add a little more salt than usual in hot weather, and make sure you use filtered water, since chlorine can interfere with fermentation.
Summertime Tomato Salad
This is another old favorite. It’s my mother’s recipe. I remember eating this on a hot summer night in New York when we were in Central Park on the Great Lawn for a nighttime concert of the New York Philharmonic. Lying on a blanket in warm air with my favorite summertime salad; it’s a memory the flavor still brings back today.
I’ve previously posted the recipe; you can find it here.