Damn, but it's hot[1]. Nothing for it but to retreat into the darkened cave of the house, windows heavily draped against the sun, and listen to the AC compressor laboriously convert our bank account into coolish dryish air.
So what do you eat for dinner[2] when it so stinkin' hot you don't want to turn on the oven or stove, and you can't afford to eat out because you've spent all your money attempting to drain heat from the house, and besides going out involves interacting with -- with people? And you've already eaten as many green salads as you can stand, plus that thing M. makes with the croutons and the white beans and balsamic vinegar[3], which is really tasty but the kid turns up her nose at it?
This, then, the dilemma facing me as I stood staring towards the hulking mass of the refrigerator. The solution? First, you pour yourself a glass of cheap-but-not-crappy sparkling wine[4]. Get those creative ideas going. Then, take a baguette and slice it into 2-cm. thick slices - at an angle to give more surface area. Place the slices on a cookie sheet or equivalent and put the bread aside for the moment. Pause. Drink, slowly. Get a pair of scissors and go out into your backyard. Curse the heat[5], the humidity, the relentless blazing sun. Pick a good handful of fresh basil, and about a 6-inch sprig of oregano out of your herb garden[6]. Select 3 or 4 medium-sized ripe tomatoes off your tomato plants[7] and pick them, too.
Go back inside. Finish glass; another? Sure. Chop the basil, oregano, and 4 or 5 cloves of garlic into little bits, dice the tomatoes[8], mix all the plant stuff together, and then distribute evenly over the baguette slices. Top with slices of cheese (feta, or, bowing to offspring pressure, cheddar). Drizzle olive oil over the lot, broil[9] until cheese gets bubbly[10].
[1] Yes, I'm whining about the heat when there are people without electricity stuck in the same heat.
[2] It's another hard-hitting, topical posting here at ProgReac! Look, it's not that I don't pay attention to the news. But frankly, I can't see any reason why anybody else should care about my opinion on world or national events. Anything I'd be inclined to say I'm sure has already been said, better than I could say it, somewhere else. Adding value, people. I've already got all the captive audience I need here at home, people I can harangue in person, and even tell to go to their room if they disagree with me.
[3] Sort of a panzanella, I think.
[4] Chandon, in this case.
[5] See little picture in upper left corner.
[6] In Iowa, everybody gets to play farmer!
[7] Last year was the first year we grew tomatoes, and we became addicted. Nice, vine-ripened tomatoes, (almost) ad libitem, ones that would easily go for $2.99 a pound at the local Proletarian Food Dispensing Facility (a.k.a Cub Foods, home to the lowest-quality produce in the Upper Mississippi Valley). This year we started 4 plants, and the tomatoes have started rolling in.
[8] Or cube, or whatever. As long as the final product is slightly less than 1 cm across.
[9] OK, we end up having to turn the oven on, which was what we were trying to avoid. But it's only the broiler, only for about 5 -10 minutes.
[10] The offspring turned her nose up at this too. "Ick, cooked tomatoes." Serpent's tooth, etc...
Posted by David Fleck at 29 July 2006 07:44 PM
Soba noodles, a common hot weather dish in Japan.
But for Moira, you ought to just put a bag of Orea cookies in the refigerator. Now that's tasty in the heat.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy on July 29, 2006 08:25 PM
That grilled-cheese thing sounds pretty good.
American store-bought tomatoes are a scandal. I think it's great that you are growing your own and sticking it to the corporate tomato industry. How about a windfall-tomatoes tax on these merchants of tasteless reddish death? It'll never happen with the Chimpster in office.
Posted by: Jonathan on July 30, 2006 09:44 AM
Actually, cooking is a problem down here, where it is reliably above 90 every day from June to September, and unreliably above 90 in other months. So there are things we don't cook in the summer (i.e., for about 8 months of the year), like pot roast, meatloaf, and lasagna.
I wish we had a backyard for me to kill plants in. Tomatoes are one of the easiest plants to grow, and most rewarding. Bell peppers are good, too, since the red ones are expensive at the store. We grew jalapenos and cayennes, but had a hard time figuring out what to do with them, we had so many. Fresh-picked corn is fantastic, but takes up a lot of garden room.
Zucchini, I am convinced, is the inspiration for the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This was not science fiction, by the way, just a little ahead of the news cycle.
Lettuce, on the other hand, we found useless. It couldn't stand the heat. Ditto for spinach. Broccoli was marginal. My grandparents grew bushels of green beans, but I hate 'em, so I never tried.
A co-worker of mine in Missouri said that her husband was putting up the sunshade over the peas one morning when he found himself being surreptitiously photographed. It was the neighbor's father, who was from Britain, and was astonished to see someone shading peas.
Posted by: Angie Schultz on July 30, 2006 02:16 PM
Crab Louis. Using canned crab. (Real cooks might snear at getting the crab from a can, but I don't claim to be a real cook.) You do have to hard boil some eggs, but that doesn't create too much heat.
Yes, it is a sort of salad, but a different sort.
Posted by: Jim Miller on August 1, 2006 08:01 AM