Ah, summer in Santa Fe, when you walk outside at 9 am and the sun hits your exposed shoulders, making them tingle from the sunburn you got from spending an hour on the roof tinkering with the swamp cooler, which all of a sudden seemed sooooo important. (What, you've never replaced your own cooler motor? Here's a how-to.)
While you're outside, you might as well make a pitcher of sun tea. I use a 2-quart pitcher with a built-in mesh filter for loose-leaf tea – and it works for cold brew, too.
This is weather that calls for a little Nelly, which will have your booty bumpin' all over the roof. (Although … sigh, it's not suitable for little listeners who have started understanding the words to things, thereby ruining approximately 34 percent of your music collection until 2030. Dammit.)
On your way back in to the kitchen, grab that bottle of red wine you were thinking of having with dinner and stick it in the fridge. Because what is it, like 75 degrees in your house? Your light, fruity reds should be somewhere between 50° and 60°, while a cabernet or zinfandel should be more like 65°. Leave it in the fridge for a couple of hours, and it should be pretty close to serving temp. If you forget, just submerge the bottle in a bucket (or small sink) filled with half ice and half water. Add a handful of salt to the water, and it will lower the freezing point of the mixture, making the water even colder and the bottle chill even faster. It's science.
Have you ever put a bottle of wine in the freezer to chill it and then forgotten about it? What a mess. Don't do that. But do freeze a bottle of pink wine and drink some … wait for it … frosé. Bon Appetit recommends you pour the wine into a 9 x 13 pan and freeze it, then blend with some lemon juice and strawberry simple syrup. I'd add a fancy paper straw.
And then I'd get to making a cold soup for dinner. Food & Wine has a collection of more than 30 great cold soup recipes here.
But of course, that won't be enough dinner for everyone, so what about asparagus pesto? Mark Bittman has a simple recipe. The commenters say you should roast the asparagus first, which sounds like genius!
I'm craving chicken lettuce wraps, which are good made with coarse-ground or finely diced chicken (cut it when it's frozen).
Or cold sesame noodles, which you can make with literally any kind of noodles you have in the house.
When I was a kid (and we didn't have any cooling at all in our house), there were many summer days when my mom would come home from work and announce there would be absolutely no cooking going on. We often had summer dinners made up of things a woman who had been sweating in a wool suit and pantyhose for nine hours could buy on her way home from work. There were a lot of grapes. Apple. Cheese and crackers. Sometimes heat exhaustion would short-circuit her otherwise strict twigs-and-berries nutritional standards, and we'd get weird "composed salads" from the deli case. Mmm … ambrosia.
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