…Stay Out Of The Kitchen

Part Two

 I hope you’re finding ways to enjoy summer, even during the days when it’s too hot to do anything except spend time in the air conditioning!!! But sometimes it’s just unavoidable—you have to turn on the oven and slave over a hot stove, even though the temperature outside is almost the same as what the oven’s preheating to! Here are some ideas to help you survive the heat wave coming from your kitchen.

When you have to turn the oven on, try to use it for more than just one thing. I always mix up two batches of brownies at the same time (just use two mixing bowls and then pour into separate baking pans) and bake them one at a time! (Trust me on that one—if you bake them together, you’ll have a crunchy brownie topping for ice cream sundaes for the next six months, but you won’t have nice soft brownies to eat!) I bake the ones we’re going to eat right away in a 9×13 pan, and then I use two pie plates for the second batch, which freeze nicely in one gallon storage baggies. By this time, the oven’s been on for an hour, but you have accomplished dessert for tonight and one or two other occasions, too!

 Ditto with your main dish: double up. If the oven’s going to be on and heating up the house, make sure you’re getting enough left-overs that they can do double-duty for at least one more meal, and preferably two or three more!

 I think it’s worth it to give serious consideration to when you fire up the oven: in the morning, before the heat of the day gets too awful, or at suppertime, when the heat of the day is in full force. I’ve found that if I heat up my kitchen early in the day, my house has a hard time recovering, and it seems hot the rest of the day. If I crank up the oven at suppertime, my house is already warm, but in my neck of the woods I only have an hour or so before I can throw open the windows and enjoy the night breezes’ cooling effect! Your air conditioning may be more efficient than mine, so experiment with what works best for you!

 Also, think about what foods you commonly cook on the stovetop that could be relegated to the microwave. I found a $5 microwave steamer that cooks rice, pasta, and steams veggies, and I will never go back to the stovetop for any of those things again! (In fact, I bought a second one for our camper!) I never succeeded at making a batch of pasta on my stovetop without the starchy water boiling over and making a mess on my glass-top stove, but I love that my microwave steamer can cook a pound of pasta in under 15 minutes with no mess to clean up!

 I’ll never be a Martha Stewart or a Julia Childs. I don’t have the cooking “gene” and I am constantly thinking of ways to stay OUT of the kitchen and still make sure my family eats well. I hope you’ll join me on my quest to stay calm, cool, and collected while facing down the sometimes-necessary evils of a hot kitchen! Share your tips here, and we’ll stay cool together!

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