Salmon Salad with White Beans, Blue Cheese and Dried Cranberries

Too Hot to Cook

July 2013

It happens every summer. When the weather is oppressively hot and sticky, the thought of cooking is depressing. Even worse, your clothing clings so that the thought of dressing for dinner in a restaurant feels unbearable. You’re bored with barbecuing and the salads and cooked entrees from your favorite takeout place have become monotonous.

But you and your family have to eat.

Here’s a happy note. You actually don’t have to cook to make a decent, filing and satisfying dinner. Summer meals can be easy on the cook with a few no-cook options.

To begin with, there are cold soups, which can be meals unto themselves or paired with a salad or sandwich. Gazpacho is a summertime favorite, loaded with sweet-smelling summer tomatoes at their peak, icy-crisp bell peppers and cucumbers, chopped fresh herbs to spike the seasoning, croutons well seasoned and pleasurably crunchy. You can bulk up this dish by adding canned white beans or chick peas, a few olives, a cut-up avocado, leftover crumbled fish or cooked shrimp from the market.

Beyond Gazpacho are rich and silky “blender soups,” which are like smoothies, but the flavors are savory and you eat them with a spoon instead of sipping them through a straw. These soups take just minutes to make and are refreshing and full of flavor. In addition, they provide a good way to give a nutrition-packed meal to your children.

Blender soups are mixtures of fruits and soft vegetables processed with a dairy item such as yogurt, buttermilk or sour cream, or non-dairy coconut milk, soy milk and nut milk and the like. Simply place cut up ingredients such as avocado, mango, papaya, strawberries, tomatoes, cucumber, zucchini in a bender or food processor with the other ingredients and let them whirl until pureed. You can even use canned or frozen products such as beets, peas and beans.

Season blender soups either simply (chopped chives, a cut up garlic clove or bit of mint or parsley) or include a more complex variety of flavors from various fresh herbs and condiments (such as harissa, sriracha or basil pesto). It all depends on what your family likes. You can keep the soups on the mild side, but it’s easy to give them some heat by adding chopped fresh chili peppers.

Beyond soup are salads that can be at the ready with fresh produce and canned or packaged items. Chopped salad is a perfect example, with its cut-up tomatoes, cucumbers, celery and bell peppers. If that doesn’t seem filling enough for dinner, use it as a template, then add crumbled feta or goat cheese, canned chick peas or black beans; extra produce such as avocado, chopped kale, frozen peas, edamame or corn; a can of tuna, salmon or sardines. Chopped salad is a concept, not a recipe; the items you include depend on what you have in the fridge or freezer. You can serve the dish on a plate lined with radicchio or Romaine lettuce or stuff the mixture into pita pockets. Fact is, this is another meal-in-minutes that requires no cooking.

Dessert? There are many no-cook options. Mix blueberries (or other small fruit) and Greek style plain, vanilla or lemon yogurt, lift each berry out and place it on a parchment lined cookie sheet; freeze. About an hour later you have luscious frozen-yogurt covered fruit.

Or make a parfait: layer cut-up fruit, ice cream, chocolate sauce, crumbled cookies or biscotti, chopped nuts if you have them.

Or cut a ripe peach, nectarine or plum in half, remove the pit and stuff the hollows with sweetened mascarpone cheese. Drizzle with honey or sprinkle with freshly grated nutmeg or cinnamon-sugar and serve. Here’s another idea: cut a fresh pineapple in half, scoop the flesh, discard the center core and cut the flesh. Mix the pineapple pieces with some confectioner’s sugar plus rum, brandy or orange juice. Let the mixture rest and stuff the macerated fruit back into the pineapple shell to serve. Top with toffee pieces, whipped cream or sorbet. Another idea: Stuffed Strawberries. They’re gorgeous enough for a no-cook company dinner. Try to buy berries that are the same size. Cut them almost through starting from the small tip, pull the pieces apart gently and fill the center with sweetened cheese or whipped cream.

President Harry Truman once said that “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” It was good advice, then and now. With a couple of good no-cook recipes you can get out of the kitchen quickly and have a good dinner too.