Eat well, minus the hot kitchen

Last week was a hot one in Toronto. Even more so considering the previous week’s hardly Summery temperatures (night time lows in the single digits? In July? What madness is this?). So what’s a girl to do to keep the family fed and the kitchen cool?

PB and J sammies can only go too far, in my books. And after 3 days I was starting to have nightmare of jammie fingers getting into my yarn stash. It was clearly time to bring out the big guns.

My collection of weapons of mass nutrition that I often unholster when the mercury gets too high to fathom are as follows:

• Cold-sauce pasta
• Cold soup (aka not-really-gazpacho)
• Antipasto like objects

You’ll note the curious lack of sandwiches and salads. Sandwiches I usually skip, as I try to save these for desperate moments and one-offs, rather than the dog days of a heat wave. Salads, well, we don’t eat many. And the toddler would rather starve, apparently, than consume a lettuce leaf.

Cold-sauce Pasta

This does involve some stove action, but if you can’t boil a put of water without fear of adding additional degrees to your situation, then I might suggest looking into a more northern residence. I hear Nunavut is lovely this time of year.

The idea hear is to cook the pasta, then add it to some melange of veggies and flavourants that require no cooking save the residual heat given from the cooked pasta. You can take this trip a dozen different ways, but here are a few that google has to offer:

Too Many Chefs: Pasta with Cold Sauce.
Foodie with a Family: No-Cook Fresh Pasta Sauce
No-Cook Pasta Sauces Mean Fresh, Quick Meals

Cold Soup

Gone are the days when the only thing that one thinks of in this category is vichyssoise. Quick cold and painless, gazpacho is only the beginning. There are a dozen variations worth trying a quick googling and a refridgerator away.

White Grape Gazpacho with Toasted Almonds and Dill
Sweet Corn Gazpacho
Dhanggit’s Kitchen: Stawberry Gazpacho

Antipasto-like Object

This is a free form, what’s in the fridge plate of snackiness. Cheeses, deli meats, chopped veg and fruit. Insert some crackers and you’re done. It even works as a portable luncheon should it be far to hot to be anywhere but within 5 feet of the neighbor’s turtle pool.

What do you do to beat the heat culinary style? Leave a comment with your favorite stove avoidance method.