When it's nice outside, you want to be outside, eat outside, savor the outside—and, most likely, not raise your home's internal temperature. Try these meal ideas, cooking hacks, and no-cook recipes for easy and enjoyable summer meals.
Photo by sleepyneko.
Food magazines and sites often hit their readers with "no-cook" or "oven-free" recipes and features come spring and early summer. There are lots of good sources for such recipes, and we wouldn't dare try to provide a compilation. Instead, we're aiming to give you a few idea-starters and inspiration, as well as tips on where to look to avoid relying on the microwave when you're trying to keep the oven off.
Hearty Salads and Cold Soups
These are the classics of no-oven cooking, and for good reason. They're easy to prepare, generate no heat at all, generally, and are particularly valuable on nights when it's so hot, you don't want to eat a big meat-focused meal, anyways. You can, as the Los Angeles Times points out, make many kinds of gazpacho, from the kind of tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers you can only get in summer. Then there are salads. Throw in tofu, as detailed at Cheap Healthy Good, and you've made a full meal in a bowl, using only a knife. There are also bean salads, like this honey balsamic recipe, that provide lean protein without the use of an oven. Photo via 101 Cookbooks.
Use Other Appliances to Cook
There are all these little appliances in the modern kitchen that can heat up food on a smaller, less room-heating scale than the oven. You can make full meals in your rice cooker, or invest in a pressure cooker for cheap, fast, low-fat dishes. The slow cooker, or crock pot, is another candidate for summer cooking, since it can do the work while you're at work yourself, but how do you know how long it will cook if you have to work extra hours, or grab a cold one after work? Use one of our reader's tips and add a Christmas tree timer to fine-tune the cooking time. Photo by FotoosVanRobin. (Original posts: rice cooker, pressure cooker, crock pot timer).
Rice Noodles
I buy these in staggering amounts at the local Asian market for scarily low prices. Why? Because they cook very, very quickly, and work well with whatever kind of flavor you're fending for—curries, fresh-tasting shrimp/mint/cilantro combinations, really simple tofu dishes, whatever. The Kitchn blog offers up five good rice noodle recipes. Some may require use of the stovetop to cook meat, but it's not much time.
Pesto and Pasotto
Pesto, that deliciously rich combination of leafy stuff (usually basil), nuts, and oil, is something you can make in a huge batch, then freeze with a little oil on top in ice cube trays or small containers. You can then use it in all kinds of dishes, including many no-heat-needed recipes. If actual cooked pasta is something you love, but waiting for water to boil and steam up the kitchen is not, then try "pasotto." It is, as The Atlantic explains it, a pasta that's cooked like risotto—less water, less time, less overall heat, and flavor-packed. Photo by jonrawlinson.
(Original pasotto post).
Crazy-Fast Cold Desserts
The gold standard in no-oven-needed desserts, besides fresh fruit, is probably no-bake cheesecake that's had time to get nice and cool in the fridge. Beyond that, there are recipes you can pull off, minutes after dinner, that yield delicious results very quickly. Man, have we covered the heck out of quick frozen desserts, actually:
Five-minute ice cream: Frozen fruit, sugar, heavy cream, and vanilla, in a blender or processor.
Two-ingredient ice cream: Honey, cream, vanilla and flavoring if you'd like, and time to whisk and freeze.
15-minute dry ice cream: The basic ice cream ingredients, but also, well, liquid nitrogen.
One-ingredient banana "ice cream": Nothing but deeply frozen bananas, and the faith that, with enough blending, they will turn out creamy and delicious. They will.
Five-minute sorbet in a plastic bag: Good fruit juice, rock salt, a sealing plastic bag, and some other flavorings, if you'd like. Sock monkey optional.
Liquid Nitrogen Watermelon Ice Cream: Watermelon + cream + science experiment = a very tasty, very cold dessert.
How do you get your meals cooked when it's hot, darned hot outside? What's your laziest go-to recipe? We want to hear them, and maybe link them later, in the comments.