Cool, Make-Ahead Meals For Long, Hot Days

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

This weather calls for strategy. It is not just New York City, it seems the whole country is under siege right now from soaring temperatures, thunderstorms, and weather patterns where the only thing that is predictable is the unpredictability.

With these conditions constantly in mind, I have been looking for meals that do two things: 1. Limit the amount of time I need to have a stove or oven on, and 2. Can last for days to come.

It is easy to understand why I would want to keep the burner and oven action to a minimum. All that time I have spent trying to cool down the apartment with carefully arranged fans, optimized for circulation and sparing use of the air conditioning to minimize the electricity bill can all be undone in one hour of dinner prep. The hot flames of the stove do battle with the cool air of the fan and it seems the stove always wins.

Making food that can be eaten and improves rather than deteriorates with time serves a dual purpose. It is another way to keep from turning on the stove again, and should a freak thunder and hail storm roll through town you don’t have to worry about running out for supplies. Dinner is at the ready, chillin’ in the refrigerator.

Two dishes I prepared this week served this purpose well. The first, fish escabeche, is a popular way of preserving fish in countries ranging from North Africa to Mexico to the Philippines. In each country the idea is essentially the same: fish is cooked then set aside to soak in a sweet and sour mixture of peppers, onions, garlic, vinegar, and sometimes citrus. I made mine with local North Atlantic hake, a sweet fleshed white fish that stood up well to the days in the marinade. Whether I ate it cold as a salad or reheated it slightly to have over rice, even days later the fish not just tasted good, it kept getting better.

The second meal was born of my desire for a vegetarian lunch hearty enough to get me through a long day but without needing to fire up a burner every lunchtime. The French have an excellent solution for this dilemma in the form of miniature puy lentils. In France, it seems even their legumes are sophisticated. Tiny puy lentils take only 30 minutes to become tender on the stove top with out ever losing their delicate form, unlike other varieties.

My lentils got a flavor boost from a broth of chicken stock combined with bay leaf, onion, clove, and garlic as aromatics. Still warm, I tossed them a punchy dressing of red wine vinegar, whole grain mustard and olive oil. Early one morning before the mercury rose too high I roasted several golden beets. Peeled and cubed, I tossed the beets in with the lentils. For days that week I put those lentils to work, mixing them with shredded lacinato kale, dotting them with goat cheese and a drizzle of olive oil, and one day as the accompaniment to escabeche.

Steamy, stormy weather does not have to be a sentence for a hot and stuffy house or eating frozen dinners. Foods like escabeche and lentil salad require cooking once for days of eating. Then when the hunger pangs hit, just open the refrigerator and pull up a chair next to the air conditioning. These make-ahead dishes will get you through blazing days of summer just a little bit cooler.

Serves/Makes: 8

• 4 medium golden beets
• 1 cup French (puy) lentils
• 3 1/2 cups chicken stock or water
• 1/2 medium onion
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 whole clove
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 tablespoons whole grain mustard
• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• salt and black pepper
• 4 ounces goat cheese
• 1 bunch lacinato kale, stems removed