Summer Challenge

For the past week or more, it has been over 80 degrees here every day. And of course, there's humidity to go with that too. It's been tolerable with our (really nice) ceiling fans and breaking out the shorts after our long winter but I still don't like having to do things that warm up the house such as laundry or cooking. As you may have guessed, we don't have air conditioning.

With laundry, you have the simple option of drying your clothes outside. I try to do this as often as I can (although it can be pretty miserable just hanging them up out there with the sun beating down and the humidity making you sweat). I have noticed that with a baby, it is a LOT harder than just throwing them in the dryer since it's hard to get her and a basket of laundry outside. Plus, I have to be careful about her sun exposure and everything too. Basically, you should do it but I understand it's not always feasible. (I will mention for those of you without yards, they do make retractable clotheslines [we even have one] that you can put indoors, in front of a sunny window is best but not necessary).

For cooking, I have a previous blog post (in June of 2013. Sorry I don't have the link back) that talks about meal ideas without the oven. Of course, a couple of them use the stove top but that is usually more bearable than the oven. This year, I have started a new summer challenge. Any day (basically every day in summer) that it's just too hot to think about turning on the oven, I won't. So far we have gone since Saturday without turning the oven on. We have grilled things (turns out, you can grill just about anything! We've done frozen tater tots, steaks, brats, and we're even considering making brownies on the grill!), used the microwave, and once we used the stove top.

If I had thought about this in advance, I would've made and frozen more meals (like I did before our baby) so we would just heat them up in the microwave and not have to warm up the house. Since I didn't do that, here are your options:

• grilling (basically anything you can make in the oven, you can make on the grill. However, someone has to be willing to stand outside to cook)
• microwave (meals made back in winter and then frozen, if using prepackaged foods most of them give microwave directions even if it's not the method of choice, etc)
• stove top (like grilling, this is still warm but for much shorter periods of time than the oven)
• moist heat (this is how we cook our shrimp)
• slow cooker (put in the garage or on the front porch)
• making things that don't require any cooking

So I will see how long my challenge lasts but I think it would be awesome if we could go the whole summer without turning on the oven once (unless we suddenly have a weird weather day and it's actually cool enough to consider it). I think 75 degrees is my general line.