No AC? No Problem!

​No AC? No Problem!
I lived for many years without AC in the top floor of a 4- floor walk-up. At that time I knew very little about cooking and we didn’t cook. Oh, and I was hospitalized one time because I was so hot I couldn’t even keep water down.

After that we ate out, at the mall where it was air conditioned, and didn’t come home until it was dark.
Then we moved into a house. Still not cool in the summer, but at least we had windows with air flow and we made do for several years.

When I was pregnant with my second son, we had AC installed in our house. We had a good cross-breeze but the neighbors smoked, and the smoke got sucked into our house, which made it impossible, as an uncomfortable pregnant lady, to live with the windows closed. I loved having AC. It was marvelous for cooking whatever I wanted, no matter the weather.

Last year, however, we lived through our first summer in a very different home, without a cross breeze on the main floor, no AC, and a “heat dome” that kept my city in Alberta, Canada, stupefyingly hot.

​The kids spent the summer in the basement, and I did not cook unless I was cooking outside on the deck with a small appliance. Even then, sometimes, it was too hot.

Here’s what I’ve learned about summer cooking, after experiencing both the bliss of AC and the discomfort of not having it:
-Don’t cook…unless it’s cool, cloudy, and breezy (Like my picture up there) If that’s the case, open up those windows, set up some fans, and cook ahead as much as you can. Make a triple batch of chili, a couple of meatloaves, a pot of soup, some egg bites, roast a pork loin…whatever you can do when it’s cool enough to do so will help you weather the…weather…no matter what it looks like. Just remember to label and date everything and freeze what you can so it’s easy to pull out to eat when you need to.

-Sandwiches and salads are your friends.

-So is the microwave

How have you survived summertime cooking? I’d love to hear! Drop me a line here or hop over to Facebook and join the conversation there. Until next time…(stay tuned for an exciting challenge!)

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