Daily Archive

This post is part of Real Food Wednesays, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.

I’ve never been a fan of the heat. As the temperature rises, my body becomes more and more unwilling to function. My memories of living in Louisiana as a seven-year-old mostly revolved around watching the other kids play outside while I ate cherry jello (my mom’s remedy for upset tummies) and sat with an ice pack on my head. As an adult, I returned rather unwillingly to the South. My body reacts much the same way to the heat as it did as a child: nausea, headache, lethargy, dizziness. Summer is a very long season for me.

In Memory Of Summer... by zu78

I determined to discover some real food strategies for getting through the 90° days which started this year in March. I work toward centering meals around light foods which are easier to digest and won’t tax my body. We eat foods with a higher water content like fruit to make sure dehydration isn’t a problem. We search out foods that feel cool in our mouths, like cucumber and mint, to give us a psychological boost. Many meals we eat are consumed cold and prepared in ways that force as little heat into the house as possible. And guess what? All these appropriate foods are local and in season now, right when we need them! How convenient!

• Dawn rarely breaks below 80°, so for breakfast we often eat fruit soup. It’s just a piece of local, organic fruit, cut up and tossed in a bowl with a piece of torn up bread and covered with milk.
• When I clean out the refrigerator before going grocery shopping, if there’s some overripe fruit needing to be used, I’ll toss it in the blender and freeze it in an ice cube tray. The cubes are then ready to toss into smoothies and slushes. A couple fruit cubes in a bowl with a spoon beat storebought popsicles any day of the week.
• If I find a really good price on local fruit, I’ll stock up and process it in a juicer, freezing the juice in one set of small cubes and the pulp in another set. The juice cubes make great kefir soda and kombucha flavoring, and the pulp is wonderful added to smoothies, pancakes or butter to spread on toast. After a glut of local lemons this year, I have enough lemon cubes in the freezer to make instant frozen lemonade all summer.
• Leftover meats are tossed onto main dish salads for most of our lunches. It only takes a little meat or cheese to add enough protein to a big salad to tide us over all afternoon. The amazing bounty of seasonal foods this time of year keep the salads always changing and never boring!
• Instead of using the oven or stove, my crockpot gets a workout this time of year for dinner meals.
• My bread machine does its work in the garage where the hot air vents directly outdoors instead of into my kitchen! Someday I’d like a solar oven for baking bread. Why let all that free solar power go to waste while I spend dollars on electricity to do the same thing?
• Digestion raises my body temperature a lot, so I try to incorporate lots of high enzyme foods into my diet. The enzymes help the process so my body doesn’t have to work quite as hard. Sprouts go on salads, homemade lacto-fermented pickles sit next to meats, homemade lacto-fermented pickled peppers (my favorite) go on buttered bread, in salads, or just plain on a fork!
• Drinking water in the hottest part of the day tends to make my nausea worse, but sipping a little kombucha or coconut kefir makes it better. I make sure there’s something always fermenting on my counter for tomorrow’s beverage.
• My ice cream maker gets a daily workout, usually making a fruit sorbet to top off our dinner meal. I find ice cream too heavy for me when it’s too hot, but a fruit-only sorbet is light and refreshing. One of our favorites is watermelon. Take the fruit out of the rind, remove the black seeds and blend it until it’s smooth. Now just toss it into an ice cream maker and let it run until the mixture is frozen. You can use pineapple with coconut milk for a pina colada sorbet, or a blend of whatever fruits are locally available and ripe. Peaches? Cherries? Be sure to taste your slurry before freezing it because most of the time sweetener is not even needed when using local fresh fruit.
• And ice cream isn’t too heavy if it’s the meal instead of the dessert. In a trick I learned from Kelly the Kitchen Kop, we will sometimes have an ice cream meal. One scorcher of an afternoon, we had ice cream for lunch. I supplemented my meal with a couple spears of broccoli that had been steamed then refrigerated in a homemade raspberry vinaigrette. My daughter asked if she could have broccoli, too. I told her “Yes, you may have a green vegetable, but not until you finish your ice cream, young lady!” We had a good laugh about that.

The biggest change this year has been my attitude. Instead of complaining my way through yet another 100° day with 70% humidity, I’m thinking, “Ooh, it’s gonna be a scorcher. What cool treat can I mix up for this afternoon?” It’s become a creative outlet and welcome challenge to think my way through rather than just sit there stewing in my own juices.