While stove top meals may be great ways to warm up your house in winter, they are just recipes for sweating in summer.
Most people think of dinnertime as the time when you sit down to a warm, hearty meal, but food doesn't have to be warm or hearty to fill you up. Salads, cold soups, sandwiches, and more don't need any time over a fire or in an oven, but they will satisfy your hunger just as well as something that might.
Below is what you can make when it's too hot to cook.
Salads
This is actually one of my favourite dinners, hot outside or not. Chop up whatever you have in the fridge, toss it in a large bowl, and call it dinner.
My favourite salad is fresh lettuce, chopped leftover chicken, bacon, cucumbers, peppers, carrots, sliced hard-boiled eggs, avocado, and toasted pecans, all tossed with Ranch dressing. Below we share a chicken salad recipe by cookbook author and chef Fatima Sydow.
Soup
Make up some cold soups: IOL Lifestyle has some easy recipes on how to make cold soups. These don't require any cooking and can be whisked up or chopped down in less than a few minutes.
Pull out a platter or board, and turn dinner into an event. Build a charcuterie board with whatever you have on hand - crackers, cheese, vegetables, fruit, meat, nuts, chips, pretzels, bread.
This is especially fun if you are feeding little kids - it’s like choosing your adventure meal, you make the rules. Head out the patio for a home picnic or fire up a movie and kick back and relax.
Spicy chicken salad
Serves: 3
Ingredients
3 chicken breasts roasted in the oven for 45 minutes on the bone and marinated with spices of your choice.
1 packet of mixed lettuce leaves
2 apples, cored and cut into thin slices
½ small onion, chopped into slivers
Remove the skin and bone from the chicken and cut or shred with fingers into bite-size pieces.
Mix the lettuce leaves and the rest of the ingredients in a bowl.
Dish the salad on a plate and place the chicken pieces on top of the salad.
Drizzle fresh lemon juice over chicken and salad.
This originally appeared on IOL
