Hot Weather Eats

Our cabin, like most Alaskan homes, is very insulated. and built to retain heat. Consequently, it's very comfortable during the long, cold winters, but hard to cool down in the summertime. Even when outside air temperatures drop at night, the house doesn't cool down until long after midnight. I strategize cooking so as to minimize the heat I add to our living space. I do not turn on the oven, I avoid even the toaster oven, and on the hottest of days, I won't even make a pot of rice.

I often make potato salad early in the morning, and I dice the potatoes before boiling them so they cook in a few minutes. Before COVID, fresh bread was in our starch rotation, but now I limit my visits to public places and can't just pop into the bakery every day! I cook quite a bit of Asian noodles and angel hair pasta, both of which are very quick! Hmmm why am I only talking about starch? Maybe because proteins and veggies are much easier to cook quickly and/or eat raw, so they are less of a challenge. :) And no, neither DL nor I can be a "low carb" person. We are both very active and need quite a bit of food, and eating too much meat is not healthy, so... We just need the carbs to bulk up! We are not goats and cannot live on nothing but leafy vegetables!

We do eat a lot of fruits! And Miss Thistle loves to sample them, including PLUM!

Princess Cricket has less of a sweet tooth and sometimes declines fruits but she loveslovesloves BELLPEPPER!!

Our CSA shares, from Rosie Creek Farm, are getting pretty big! This is their "medium".

Thistle Must Examine!

I had a brilliant idea of what to do with the radishes they keep giving us. I shred and salt them and make do chua. I mean, radishes are basically tiny daikons, right? In fact, a lot of Asian immigrants don't even know the word "daikon" and call them "giant radishes". :)

After several weeks of eating it straight-up, I realized that I could make banh mi! So I bought some fresh jalapeños and some frozen char siu. Everything else critical--sriracha, mayonaise, cilantro--we have onhand. Oh, except for bread. Rather than Brave the Bakery, I tried to get a baguette from the grocery store, but they were out, so I got these baked buns. They are light and fluffy and have a nice, chewy crust, almost like a Vietnamese baguette! now I can call my sandwiches bun mi! :D

That night, I made salads since it was another hot one and I refused to turn on the stove!

Mmmm bun mi! :D

One low-BTU protein is salmon. I can pan-fry it in under five minutes:

This was a slightly cooler evening, so I braved buckwheat noodles (under 5 minutes of simmering) and stir-fried turnip greens (2 minutes, fresh from my neighbors' garden!).

Shrimp also cooks super quickly! And if you make a tomato and pesto sauce, it doesn't even need to cook at all. This is angel hair, of course. I refuse to make noodles that take more than a few minutes.

I found a box of almond jello powder in the back of my cabinet! I had not had almond jello in so very long that I drew a blank for a few seconds. I stared at it and thought, "Cool! Almond haupia! How exotic!" Then I realized that it looked familiar and not exotic at all. Then I realized that it was not almond haupia, it was almond jello, which is a very common Chinese childhood memory! I decided to serve it how they do in restaurants so I bought a can of fruit cocktail--yes, complete with those weird candied cherries! DL was impressed that I bought such nonsense. He thought I was incapable. But I bought my childhood! :)

Then of course a few days later I had to make actual haupia. I found nice mangoes in the store to go with that.

Now the weather is cooling down slightly, and some rain has come. Please keep a prayer in your heart for the wildland firefighters!