With heat waves rolling over New York City and much of the country, going outside feels like running errands in a rice cooker. Even the backs of my knees have become chronically sweaty.
In sweaty-knee conditions, cooking absolutely has to be quick and efficient, with recipes designed to help you keep your cool. Cold noodle dishes, for example, are ideal for this kind of weather. We have a slew of excellent ones here, including Hetty Lui McKinnon’s cold noodle salad with spicy peanut sauce.
With its flexible nature, this colorful salad is the kind of thing you can turn to all summer long. Just toss whatever vegetables you have with the springy soba noodles and piquant sauce, making sure to use a mix of crunchy and juicy ingredients — crisp cucumbers, floppy sliced peppers, soft bits of tomato — to get a range of textures. The creamy peanut sauce, spiked with lime juice and sweetened with maple syrup, brings everything together.
Featured Recipe
Cold Noodle Salad With Spicy Peanut Sauce
More food for thought
Ranch grilled chicken: For those brave enough to fire up the grill (and maybe not living in a heat dome of your own right now), here’s Christian Reynoso’s smart new chicken recipe. Christian uses a homemade, yogurt-based ranch dressing as a marinade for boneless chicken thighs, and then drizzles it over the charred, grilled meat after it’s been tossed with radishes and a handful of the same herbs used in the dressing.
Skillet orzo with chorizo and dates: Sheela Prakash takes a panful of goat cheese-laced orzo and cleverly applies the same cooking method paella makers use to get a crisp crust (called socarrat), which is arguably the best part. Cured Spanish chorizo adds smoky, porky notes, while sweet dates have a pleasing, soft chew. Serve it as is, or pile some on top of a bowl of greens for an impromptu salad.
Sheet-pan roasted salmon with Tuscan bread salad: How about one more from Sheela, this time cooked on a sheet pan? Using panzanella as her inspiration, she roasts salmon fillets on one side of the pan and olive oil-coated bread chunks on the other. She then tosses them together with an anchovy-Dijon vinaigrette and ripe tomatoes for a buoyant, summery salad.
Shrimp tacos: These speedy tacos from Yewande Komolafe are welcome at my table all year long, but they seem especially suited for steamy weather. The crisp slivers of red cabbage feel so cooling and fresh next to the cumin-spiced shrimp and creamy avocado. A squeeze of lime adds just the right acidic note.
Ice cream with olive oil and dates: Ali Slagle’s brilliant ice cream glow-up is a near-instant no-cook recipe that puts a sophisticated spin on a pint of store-bought ice cream (along with any dates left over from Sheela’s orzo). It’s just the kind of multitextured, cooling dessert to cure sweaty knees.
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That’s all for now. See you on Monday.
Melissa Clark has been writing her column, A Good Appetite, for The Times’s Food section since 2007. She creates recipes for New York Times Cooking, makes videos and reports on food trends. She is the author of 45 cookbooks, and counting.
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