A Not So Serious Look at Summer Cooking

By

Leigh Spencer

This year August has been for me been a welcome change with the cooler temperatures. I say this knowing that September can be very hot and even in October the heat can come on in the morning and the A/C in the afternoon. What does this have to do with cooking you ask yourself?

Even when the temperatures are in the hundreds we still need to eat and that means cooking. Living out in the Applegate we have to drive up to thirty minutes to get anywhere to go out to eat. If we get take out, then it would be cold by the time we got home or at least warm. Take and Bake is an option, but isn’t the idea of getting ready prepared food to eliminate having to cook it and adding heat to an already warm house?

So what options do we have? The first is salad. We did that one summer, after what seemed like a month of having various forms of salad for our main evening meal, I felt as though I had grown big floppy ears, a fluffy tail and was about to start hopping around. I was in danger of turning in to a rabbit. The second is using the barbecue, in our household that is my husband’s domain; he gets to use it and also has the job of cleaning it! We don’t barbecue! There are also sandwiches, ice cream, fruit, and cold meat in fact anything that doesn’t require cooking or we could visit the deli department of our local grocery store, however deli does come in small packages so feeding a hungry family deli on a regular basis is a very expensive option only to be thought of if we ever win the lottery.

What does that leave us? Amazingly my rice cooker, crockpot and barbecue. Yes the barbecue, we use it as an outside oven. We have discovered how effective our barbecue is when being used as an oven. This discovery came about during a power outage when I had a half cooked pie in the oven. Instead of waiting for the power to return we used the barbecue to finish baking the pie. Since then barbecue has been used to cook a variety of dishes usually cooked in the oven. The rice cooker, the fuzzy logic kind is our most used small kitchen appliance next to the toaster, coffee maker and electric kettle. Although the instructions don’t say you can make an entire meal in it, I have found that by adding frozen veggies and pre-cooked meat at the start of the cooking cycle you have a hot meal in a pot.

Of course we do have salad and cold food, but it is fun to be able to cook warm food in the heat of summer without heating the house. If the truth be known then my favorite form of cooking is the one pot variety and that works for twelve months of the year.