Cooking and Baking in the Summer
Who likes to eat good food? I certainly do. In fact in addition to eating good foods, I also like to cook and bake many good main dishes, sides, salads, and desserts all year long. I love to bake pumpkin pies and chocolate chip cookies for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Hanukkah. I also love to make meals and desserts for summertime entertaining. However, with very high temperatures and much humidity in the summer, I have a tough time getting motivated to cook or bake anything; in the summertime all I want to eat are cool foods like salads and fruit. As far as drinks and desserts go I usually make iced tea, or water with just a splash of lemon and lime with much crushed ice. And, I like to eat ice cream in the summer. When I do cook or bake in the summertime, I usually use no cook recipes. No cook recipes are the subject of this article.
No bake recipes for summer usually have a few easy components to them. First, make absolutely certain that the recipe is truly a no bake recipe. This first step may sound like common sense but I am saying this because I had what I thought was a no bake recipe for cheesecake, however, it turned out that the cheesecake recipe did require a little bit of baking. Second, no bake recipes are very easy to understand and to follow. Third, no bake recipes have easy to find ingredients. Fourth, no bake recipes have very little preparation time and they are easy to clean up from.
Many no bake recipes have fruit or ice cream in them. Also, no bake recipes are usually salads, sandwiches, and side dishes. Having said that however, there are more no bake dessert recipes that I would have thought there would be. Also, there are many no cook soup recipes as well. No cook salad recipes are very popular in the summertime. Here are a few no cook salads that are cool and refreshing:
*Black Bean Salad
*Cucumber, Pineapple, and Tomato Salad with an Asian Dressing.
*It’s a Wonderful Waldorf Salad.
Many people would never think of having soup in the summer time because of the heat and the humidity. However, there are a couple of cold soups that just might hit the spot on a hot day. My favorite cold soup is called Gazpacho. Gazpacho is part of Mexican cuisine and it has a chilled tomato juice base with many vegetables such as celery, corn, and beans. People who like avocados might like cold avocado soup.
A great no cook sandwich recipe would be a bagel with cream cheese, lox, which us smoked salmon, tomato, and cucumber. This bagel sandwich could also have onions on it. Also, many no cook sandwich recipes include tuna. In addition, I like to make many no bake sandwich recipes with pita bread. I like to put alfalfa spouts, sesame seeds, feta cheese, lettuce, tomato, and onion in pita bread for lunch I call it The Greek salad sandwich.
No summertime meal would be complete with out a bake desert. A very simple summer no bake dessert recipe is to cut up a bunch of fruit such as watermelon, peaches, honeydew, and plums to make a fruit salad. Or if cutting up fruit is a hassle then, simply put strawberries and blueberries on a plate and top it off with a bit of whipped cream. Another good no bake dessert recipe is a root beer float. I like to use a medium to large glass for a root beer float. Put two scoops of either vanilla or French vanilla ice cream in the bottom of the glass and pour about 3/4ths of a cup of root bear on top of the ice cream. For non traditionalists, mint chocolate chip ice cream can be used in place of vanilla ice cream. No bake recipes seem to be the best bet for the summer time. The asterisked recipes can be found on Epicurious.com.
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