Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Summer Cooking--Tips for Cool Meals

Are you tired of cooking in the heat? Here are suggestions from Jill at Living on a Dime (http://www.livingonadime.com/) for quick and easy summer meals.

First, in the morning when it's cooler:

• Clean a large supply of carrot sticks and celery sticks and keep them in water in the refrigerator.

• Boil a dozen or so eggs to store.

• Have some lettuce and grated cheese on hand. (I buy my cheese already grated because the grated cheese costs the same as the block cheese. I believe in doing a lot of things from scratch but I don't believe in killing myself over grating cheese. Besides, no matter how careful I am I almost always grate a knuckle so I have to really psych myself up to grate cheese.)

• Keep lunch meat or sliced meat on hand.

If you keep a few things like this on hand you can make quick and easy meals, even on very hot and tiring days.

Quick and Easy Summer Meals

• Make chef salads. Just chop up some of your cleaned carrot and celery sticks, slice your hard boiled eggs, sliver some of you lunch meat and you have a chef salad. You can add any other vegetables you want, too.

If everything is cleaned in advance it makes cooking in a hot kitchen so much easier and faster. Don't forget the cheese.

• Egg salad, tuna salad or sandwiches. You can use those hard boiled eggs to make egg salad sandwiches or add them to tuna. Serve on lettuce for a tuna salad. You can add the cleaned celery to the tuna salad, too.

• Keep it simple. Some of the best summer meals I ate were when I went to my grandma's in Iowa. She would slice up some tomatoes, put sliced cucumbers in salt and vinegar water and set out some cottage cheese. For an extra hearty meal, she would add some soft bread with butter and apple butter. It was delicious.

Tawra (Jill’s daughter) was born in July and, after many long hard hours of labor, the first meal they brought me was a fruit platter with all kinds of fresh fruit and crackers and cheese. If you were to ask me to name the top five meals of my life, this would be one of them. Try it for your family!

Use these ideas to make summer cooking simple!

For more money-saving ideas go to http://www.livingonadime.com./