HOME * MAILING LIST * CONTACT * ABOUT

Beating the Heat

Summer has arrived and that means, among other things, that there are ice cubes in the cat’s water dish, and I’m eating sliced tomatoes on toast for breakfast. This year, thanks largely to my immersion blender, I am also the Queen of Smoothies – fresh fruit, yoghurt, milk, and a little lime cordial, all chilly from the fridge. I figure that I need to start my days off cool, and try to stay cool as much as I can during the day, because the house heats up no matter what I do.

I live in an old house. Approximately 100 years old, in fact. It was built as a single-family dwelling in the Victoria model and has not aged well, in part due to a succession of landlords who chose to cut corners when renovating or making repairs. It has been broadly understood that much of the work involved in separating the house into three suites was performed by drunken monkeys, and that the insulation, such as it is, consists of spiders, ants, and dead bees. The antithesis of a duvet commercial, the place is hot during the summer, and cold during the winter – more so than your average, well-maintained home, that is.

During the winter, the ancient furnace has done relatively well (most of the time) to keep us warm despite the large, single-glazed windows and poor weather-stripping around the doors, and the odd blind spot is easily taken care of with a space heater when necessary. During the summer, the challenge is to try to keep the place cool. Most of the windows, outside the basement and the bedroom, have been clumsily and unattractively caulked shut and given a layer of cheap paint. This leaves, as the only two routes of outdoor ventilation (besides that of the inadvertent wall ventilation caused by crummy workmanship) – the front door and the verandah door. The front door leads to a busy street, and the verandah door leads to, well, a verandah. Leaving either (or both) of these doors open requires constant supervision of the cat, who is lovable but a bit dim, not to mention clumsy. We don’t let him out the front door at all, and the verandah is directly beneath the alluring fire-escape ladder that leads to the upstairs suite. He is quite adept at getting up there, getting stuck and scared; it is a challenge to bring him down with a minimum of scratching, biting, and attempts to flee. He has also fallen off the verandah railing at least once. Did I mention clumsy? The upshot of this is that it can be a real challenge to cool off the house in summer unless we have time to supervise the fuzzy little trouble-maker. Preventing the place from heating up to begin with seems to be our best weapon. A screen door to the verandah would help considerably, but in the meantime, an effort to keep the place cool dictates that I avoid firing up the oven whenever possible.

I like using the oven. Even when autumnal casseroles and braises are not the standard, the oven gets put to use. Pizza, for one thing, which I regard as year-round food (and which, lamentably, requires the oven to be up at full blast). A good roast chicken is another thing – the cold leftovers taking on different shape in summer months than in winter. Without my oven, just using the stovetop can feel a little like cooking slyly on a hotplate in a dorm room. Still, it affords the ability to make pasta salads, and that is definitely a blessing in summer months, particularly for the take-a-lunch crowd. Chock full of fresh raw or lightly cooked vegetables, the pasta salad is truly a lunchbox friend, especially if your workplace has a refrigerator.

Salads are always a good bet, of course, - a classic beat-the-heat choice – but there’s a limit to the mountain of raw greens one can eat as a main course, and one doesn’t always want a cold meal. Since I require a fair amount of lean protein, I find myself turning to lentils, beans, cheese, and cold meats to round out my salads into a more dinner-y status. Summer can be almost more about assembly, and less about cookery. It helps that during summer our appetites seem to wane a little – oh, certainly we still get hungry, still need regular meals, but the sense of eating-for-hibernation has vanished in the face of abundant produce, much of which is delicious (perhaps even at its best) raw or with minimal culinary interference. One of the truly great summer salads is the insalata caprese, perhaps the only salad in the world that comes with a cautionary note: do not ever attempt to make this (or order it in a restaurant, or consent to eat it under any sort of duress) when it is not tomato season. When made perfectly, which is the only way this should ever be made, the tomatoes are sun-ripened and juicy, and have never seen the inside of a refrigerator. The cheese is a cool, sturdy mozzarella di bufala, preferably plain rather than marinated, and cut into moderately thick slabs to layer between the slices of tomato. The only garnish needed is a little freshly torn basil, some very good extra-virgin olive oil, a dash of sea salt (kosher will do, though) and a generous grinding of black pepper. It is best made moments before devouring. It will not brook any sort of dilly-dally – treat it almost like a soufflé and rush it to the table. If you can get meaty heirloom tomatoes, use them. This salad is the perfect summer lunch with a glass of prosecco, or a lovely precursor to a dinner.

Summer is also classically barbeque time. We don’t actually have an outdoor grill, but we do have an indoor one. While our initial attempts at using it were met with tediously mediocre results, once we realized that it required more than the instruction booklet mandated five-minute warm-up things improved markedly. For example, suddenly there was that wonderful sizzling sound when the food was placed upon it! Further experimentation has lead me to understand that cooking with the lid closed – the sought-after dual-grill effect certainly did speed up cooking time, but by virtue of creating a certain amount of steam which can erase the grill marks entirely, leaving behind dented vegetables that are cooked but do not have that attractive grilled effect. The texture can also suffer if you’re dealing with a vegetable that contains a lot of water and which benefits from an evaporation process during cooking (eggplant, I’m looking at you!), so certain things are best cooked with the lid open.

Last, but not least – oh, all right, least – is the microwave. While I appreciate its charms in the reheating and defrosting departments, the microwave gets less use in the summer but for one exception: you can cook up a mighty fine cob of corn in the microwave, without having to overly fuss about soaking it in water the way one must when cooking it on the grill or roasting it in the oven. It’s quick, has minimal clean-up, and works beautifully, whether your pleasure is to slice the kernels off for a salad or slather with lime-butter and gnaw away like a hungry squirrel. You can have piping hot corn-on-the-cob, and the house stays cool as a cucumber.

Dessert is easy: ice cream, gelato, sorbet, popsicles are all a nice cold hit on a hot summer's day, but really, all you need is fruit.  A nice, cool melon - perhaps drizzled with orange-flower water, or even a bowl of ripe cherries, pitted and wading in a spoonful of cointreau is a wonderful way to go.
 

July 2006