Letting the season get a vote…
Last week I wrote about my hot little house.
I’ve been leaning into the rhythm of opening windows at dusk, pulling the blinds before the sun heats my dining room, and embracing the way a lack of central air is making me pay attention to the seasons in ways I haven’t in years.
It’s absolutely changed the way I cook, too.
Because when it’s 95 degrees outside and I’m covered in sweat just sitting at my dining room table, the idea of turning on the oven, even for ten minutes, is nauseating.
At first blush, that might sound like a hardship. But the more I lean into it, the more I’m realizing it’s not all bad… at least not in the Old-Fashioned on Purpose sort of way.
One thing I’ve noticed about modern life is how hard we work to make every season feel exactly the same. I’ve certainly been guilty of it.
We want to cook the same meals in July that we make in January.
We want our houses the exact same temperature year-round.
We buy strawberries in December and tomatoes in February.
And somewhere along the way, we started expecting ourselves to stay the same through every season, too.
Before industrialization, the seasons were non-negotiable because life demanded it.
Today, of course, we have the luxury of ignoring them. And while I’m grateful for many of those conveniences, I also think we lose something when we never let natural rhythms influence us at all.
So this summer, I’ve been letting the weather call the shots a little more than usual.
Here’s what’s been on our menu lately:
- BLTs and whatever sandwich ingredients we have lying around.
- Chicken breasts wrapped in tortillas with cheese, lettuce, dressing, and whatever vegetables are hanging out in the crisper drawer.
- Big salads loaded with bacon, hard-boiled eggs, grilled chicken, avocado, tomatoes, and ranch (homemade or store-bought… I don’t even care right now…)
- Tacos. So many tacos.
- Cooking as much as I can in the Instant Pot since it doesn’t heat up the kitchen.
- One pan skillet meals with random meat and pasta and maybe tomato sauce or cheese or whatever I can find in the fridge.
- Stovetop mac and cheese with leftover meat stirred in for protein.
- Watermelon for supper. Period.
- Snack-board dinners with cheese, fruit, sliced meat, pickles, hard-boiled eggs, home-canned hummus, crackers, and random vegetables when it’s just too hot to care.
As I was writing this list, I realized it’s basically my MealCraft system in action.
I created it because I got tired of staring into the fridge wondering, “What on earth are we eating tonight?” Especially when it’s hot, I’m overwhelmed, or I don’t feel like making another grocery store run.
Many of us learned how to follow recipes, but very few of us were ever taught how to make dinner from what we already have.
How to look at a fridge full of somewhat random ingredients and think, “What could these become?”
One of the biggest shifts I’ve made in my own kitchen is realizing that supper doesn’t have to start with a recipe.
It starts with paying attention. (Which, once again, appears to be the theme of my current life.)
Paying attention to what’s in season. What’s already thawed. What’s in the fridge. How hot it is outside. How much energy I actually have tonight.
Then I let real life have a vote. And somehow… Dinner still gets made.
So if your house is hot like mine, your garden is overflowing (or, in my case… dead—but that’s a story for another day), and the thought of turning on the oven makes you want to die….
Let your life shape your cooking—not the other way around.
The older I get, the more I realize that’s true of almost everything.
Some seasons call for pot roast…. others call for watermelon.
The trick isn’t making every season look the same.
It’s learning to cook—and live—with the one you’re in.
—Jill
P.S. If you’ve been stuck in a “what’s for dinner?” rut, my newly revamped MealCraft Method is 15% off right now with the code PODCAST. My hope is that it helps you think differently about supper—not just this summer, but all year long.
Paying more attention…I love this and felt every bit of this post and the one about your Hot Little House. In fact, I currently have boneless chicken breast in the crockpot, seasoned with a packet of taco mix, with a can of tomato sauce, a can of pinto beans, and 1/2 cup of jasmine rice. Because that’s what I had in the house and it’s too hot and humid to cook here in North Florida too!
I’m fascinated by a random sentence containing “home canned hummus.” Great way to dip all those random vegetables — but, canned? Please share your recipe?
This recipe will be showing up in my new cookbook (coming out this October!). Stay tuned!
Meals were, prior to the 40s, also seasonal because food was so seasonal, and earlier in the 20th Century, very regional. I recall seeing a photograph of downtown Sheridan taken from the courthouse hill in which you can see a grocery store which had, painted on the side, “vegetables bought and sold”. There’s no truck farming or market gardens around Sheridan today at all, but there must have been then. For that matter, the New Mexican laborers brought up to build the concrete buildings at Ft. Laramie stayed and grew vegetables for the post and Oregon Trail migrants in the area now known as “Mexican Hills.
We generally don’t think of things like that at all now, save for those who garden extensively. In the summer, you had fresh vegetables. In the winter you didn’t. Meat was either very freshly killed or it was preserved (smoked, corned or salted). I recall my father relating that my grandmother bought meat in downtown Denver from butchers for her family every single day.
We hardly appreciate the extent to which refrigeration, both of food, and our houses, has changed things. Not all of it is for the better really.
When I was growing up we did not have air conditioning. In central Wyoming, where I lived then, and still do, air conditioning was considered something only rich people had for most of the time I was growing up. We put in a swamp cooler (still have one today) when we bought our first house I’ve never really liked it, but this summer, I have to admit, I’ve appreciated it. The extremely high temperatures are frankly scaring me and I wonder a bit if people who spend their days indoors had to endure it, if they’d take the risk of climate change more seriously.
Anyhow, my boyhood home was hot in the summer. I slept in the basement. I don’t recall my parents making any real accommodations as to what they cooked, however, except my father would cook chickens on a small rotisserie we had. It was electric, and he’d plug it in outdoors. At some point after I’d left home as an adult it was left outdoors, and when they both had passed I was afraid to plug it in. I do miss it however. Also, my father built a brick grill in the back yard, but I don’t recall it being used a single time. My wife’s ranching parents, however, did and do use outdoor grills, one home made, all the time, and we’ve taken to that.
Indeed, recently, I’ve started using the grill for frying. It’s just too hot to cook indoors.
So true!! When I was a kid, we would pick a bunch of corn on the cob from the garden and then have it for supper. And that’s it. My husband remembers his parents bringing in bowls of peas and that would be their entire supper. And those are good memories for us! Life is full of seasons and rhythms and when we pay attention and enjoy them, life is better for it.
Canned meats.
A jar of chicken, drained, mixed with mayo and some chopped celery – chicken salad in five minutes.
A jar of ground beef, chop up a salad, shredded cheese and a dressing made from mayo, ketchup, mustard & relish – cheeseburger salad in ten minutes
A jar of pickled eggs, some mayo and romaine leaves – egg salad lettuce wraps in 5 minutes.
A can of tuna and a can of drained white beans. A few diced tomatoes, pepperoncinis, olives, parmesan and Italian dressing – a simple Italian salad dinner in ten minutes.
A jar of ground beef, chopped salad with jalapeños, canned beans, shredded cheese and a dressing made by mixing salsa and sour cream – taco salad in five minutes. Add the ‘bottom of the bag’ tortilla chip bits that nobody wants for bonus frugal points.
These are great! Thanks for sharing!