Keeping Cool

It's been in the high 90's in Seattle the past few days...ugh. I love the sunshine, but the heat is almost unbearable in an apartment without air conditioning. I seriously drank more than an entire pitcher of water all by myself two days in a row, while sewing away in the sweltering heat. That's either how crazy I am, or how much I love to sew. Or both.

To beat the heat, I pulled out a neglected friend. The crockpot. I stumbled upon this fabulous website: A Year of Slowcooking with tons of great crockpot ideas. Plus, she's tried all of them and lets you know how they turn out, so I feel like I can trust the recipes.

A couple nights ago I cooked Mahi Mahi with mexican seasonings, in foil packets -in the crockpot. I never imagined cooking fish in a crockpot but it turned out great for our fish tacos.







The idea came from this recipe Foil Packet Tilapia -the only part I followed was cooking fish in foil on LOW for 4 hours but I'll be doing it again soon with another recipe.

The texture of the fish is a little different/a bit drier than usual and I much prefer fish from the grill, but since we can't cook on our deck (apartment rules) and we don't want to run the oven to make our house a billion more degrees, our crockpot comes in quite handy!

I'm trying to follow Emily's good example of coming up with a menu.

I browsed the crockpot website for more recipes and decided on these meals for the coming weeks:

Crockpot Lasagna

Orange Honey Tilapia -Slow Cooker

Slow Cooker Coconut Red Beans and Rice

Slow Cooker Puffy Pizza Casserole

Sweet Mustard Roast

I'll let you know how they go!

Non-crockpot "cool meal" ideas:

Grilled chicken Caesar salad

Grilled turkey burgers (we'll have to go to the park with our grill for both)

Angel hair pasta with garlic and diced tomatoes

By the way, we couldn't stand it any longer (after not sleeping and melting in the heat...)we got ourselves an early Christmas present...

Rod found an amazing deal on a window a/c unit for $100, marked down from $400.

It's heavenly.

But don't let that fool you, I'll still be using my crockpot. :)