Spending Summer Cooking- Quick and Easy Recipes

Now I know this article is catching those of us in the Northern Hemisphere before a nice hot summer, and those friends in the southern Hemisphere just after a nice hot summer, however I do think it might have some interest to some of the readers of this blog.

There’s just one universal thing that describes summer time. Hot! And you want to spend your summer days refreshed and cool at all times. This is why you don’t want to add more heat to your kitchen than necessary when you cook your meals. Firing up your oven will only make your kitchen hotter. One key in spending summer cool is cooking quick meals that involve less heat, less hassle, but are fulfilling on both your palette and your stomach.

The meals that you oftentimes find yourself preparing are salads and sandwiches. These are both good. The meals are quite healthy and can be refreshing. However, even if you have a lot of choices for sandwiches and a lot of choices for salads, there will come a time that you will crave for something bigger or fuller. What you can do is utilize the range top and grill more instead of using the oven. You can cook a lot of meals without adding heat to your already scorching apartment or house. Remember to turn on the exhaust fan, not only to move the cooking fumes out of doors, but also to move some of the heat created by the process out of your place.

If you still want to feel fresh and light during summer, you would be better off without heavy starches in your meals. If you want to have pasta, you can add vegetables as side dishes or make a salad using pasta. Rice based pasta is a very pleasant alternative to traditional wheat based ones. Or use the whole grain/wheat pasta and you’ll find you can use much, much less and still be satiated!

You will feel light after the meal because of the vegetables. Vegetables are a good way to improve the nutritional value of the meal and also add a great deal of color interest.
 
The same goes with sandwiches. Adding some romaine lettuce, onions, and cucumber to your sandwich filling will keep the fresh feeling and will help balance the fat from the burger, ham or chicken part of the sandwich.

Now, being a vegetarian myself, I would like to see you explore the world of cheeses to provide a protein source in the sandwich department.  There are eggs, avocados and other sources of color and nutrients to put into the sandwich. Explore and become a sandwich guru! Then you can teach others just how much fun this meal time prep and eating can be.

<a href="http://learnyourtruth.us/2011/03/29/spending-summer-cooking-quick-and-easy-recipes/grilled-avocado/&quot; rel="attachment wp-att-269"><img src="http://learnyourtruth.us/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/grilled-avocado.jpg&quot; alt="" title="grilled avocado" width="259" height="195" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-269" /></a>

Also, during the summer don’t spend too much time preparing your meals. Keep things simple. The more you move the hotter you get. The hotter you get the more irritated you become. Soon enough you’ll explode and will let it out on the people in house. Summertime is supposed to be a time to relax so chill.

Music will soothe the savage beast, even when the temps are 90f or above! Make sure you can drop some island music on the player or whatever your favorite type of sound is! You could try some Christmas music and this might certainly lighten your kitchen load-because they will all be running down to the local restaurant just to get away from-Bing Crosby’s, White Christmas!!! Or what was the song about Granny getting run over, or some such thing?

Go to your supermarket and buy those already pre-cut meats so don’t have to spend time chopping and cutting. Look for prepared vegetables as well. Also, when using marinade make certain that you maximize its use. You can actually use the same marinade for other dishes so why experiment. There will be other, more appropriate time to that so for now, stick to the easy and simple. When I wrote this I was thinking about using the same basic marinade for several types of dishes, but now that I read it over it sounds like I want you to recycle the marinade you have already used! Please, there are lots of ways to save money, however recycling juices from dead animals isn’t at all a recommended way!!!

Use your grill. Do you ever wonder why summer is always a good time for a barbeque? It is because you cook outside. It is cooler cooking in the shade and quite refreshing eating out in your backyard. You can use the pre-cuts I mentioned earlier as well as ready made marinades available in the market. This way, you will spend less time preparing the meals and have more time actually enjoying them. Remember to add some vegetable side dishes or salad with your barbeque meals.

There are a lot of things you can grill; chicken, burger, and franks and even some vegetables come to mind. If you can put over the grill I think you can figure out a way to cook it. You can even invite friends over and have some pleasant conversations during the preparation of the dinner. That’s another beauty of cooking outdoors.

<a href="http://learnyourtruth.us/2011/03/29/spending-summer-cooking-quick-and-easy-recipes/weber-grill/&quot; rel="attachment wp-att-270"><img src="http://learnyourtruth.us/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/weber-grill.jpg&quot; alt="" title="weber grill" width="259" height="194" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-270" /></a>

Summer time is actually the time of the year when you can be excused for feeling lazy. Well, that can be an exaggeration. But still during the summer heat and the humidity, you can’t help but bum around and relax all day. This is the reason why preparing and spending summer cooking quick and easy meals would be the best way to go.