A Simple Summer Meal Recipe

Denmark is currently stuck in a nasty heat wave. My husband and I are both busy with house maintenance chores, and working in this heat means we often don't have a lot of appetite, especially for a hot meal, and no one wants to spend long at the stove or grill cooking.

One of our staple meals of the summer is a thing I made up roughly inspired by the kebab-like things you can get at fast food places here. Only with better quality ingredients, flavors to fit the family palate, and cheaper.

Basically we end up with a fresh salad with some hot cooked ingredients added served with pita bread to either eat with it or shove it into as it suits you. The majority of the prep can be done ahead of time (some of it needs to be) and it really only takes 10 minutes at the stove the first day to do the cooked bit. We usually make enough for two days and nuke the leftovers for the warm part or throw them back in the skillet for a few minutes.

So there are 3 main pieces to the meal:

• A cooked part with meat, mushroom, and onions
• A mixed salad
• A yummy homemade dressing

Here's the thing. My husband hates "rabbit food" as he calls it. Salads are not high on his list of things he wants to eat. But when I make this, he eats it happily and loves it. I think the timing with the weather helps.

We also find we are both satisfied eating far less meat and carbs this way. If I just grilled the meat, we'd eat a whole chicken breast or pork chop at a meal and my husband at least would be wanting rice or potatoes and not just salad on the side. This way we eat more salad and veg than anything else and eat maybe a half to two-thirds of a breast or chop each, depending on how much else I mix with the cooked part.

I use the following and you can modify and add or remove ingredients to fit your family's diet and what's available locally where you are at the current season.

• strips of raw meat: chicken or pork are our primary choices based on budget and availability but go for what your family likes and can afford. If you're vegetarian or vegan, skip the meat or substitute tofu or something else that works for you
• optional marinade for the meat
• sour cream or similar for the dressing
• herbs and spices for the dressing and the meat
• mushrooms
• onions
• lettuce
• tomatoes
• other salad stuff (we like cubed feta, small pieces of carrot, fresh peas... whatever is around)

I mostly write up recipes for my dad, who is pretty kitchen-ignorant, so ignore any parts where you have better ways to do things for your needs or where I seem to be talking down to you. It seems safer to include more details these days as a lot of kids grow up having spent little time in a kitchen or readers might be people who are suddenly needing to cook after a lifetime of not doing so.

The Cooked Part

When cutting meat into strips, I have a little tip for you that my mother taught me years ago. Cut it up when the meat is partly frozen. Usually we use pork chops, pork tenderloin, or skinless-boneless chicken breast. When we buy it, the meat gets repacked and frozen so it suits meals-for-two-for-two-days. Chicken is usually 2-3 breasts per pack as I use it for this and chicken in curry sauce and stir fry. Chops are usually packs of four so we have a chop each for two days. With this, each package stretches to 2-3 days for chicken and maybe even more for pork.

So then I get the meat out of the freezer the night before and throw it in the fridge and early in the day I cut it up while it is still partly frozen. This makes it easier to make thinner strips that cook faster and are more appealing for this and for stir fry or fajitas.

If you want to increase the flavor of the meat or you are using cheaper cuts that might be tougher, you might want to marinate the meat. If you do this, it's a good idea to get it soaking in the marinade the night before you want to cook it or the morning of the day at the latest. Basically the longer it soaks, the better the marinade works.

Sometimes I marinate and sometimes I don't and what I use varies. This allows us to use the same concept but make different meals that taste different. I vary the dressing as well to match the meat.

I don't marinate the chicken very often. If I do, it is usually either some oil and fresh herbs and let it soak or a bit of white wine. Pork I might marinate in apple juice, alcoholic apple cider, or beer. And if you're a beer afficianado, you can experiment a lot with your beer choices to suit your tastes. We're lazy and just use Tuborg (no ranting on the beer choices here. I pretty much don't drink beer and this is what we usually have around. My husband drinks it rarely and mainly has it for the occasional visitor or thanking someone who does us a favor, like the trashman if he takes something extra beyond our usual container). Pork and apples go really well together, so I strongly recommend trying the cider or juice marinades. Not just for this, but also for chops and tenderloin that you grill as well. You can also find a ton of ideas for other marinades all over the place online. Everything involving vinegar and citrus are out for me, hence my relying on oil (which really won't do much for meat tenderness) and alcohol (which will).

I usually also include cut up onion and sliced fresh mushrooms in the cooked portion. If I have zucchini in the garden, I will cut that up and cook it along as well (zucchini is very versatile and tends to take the flavor of whatever you cook it with, so this is great for "stretching" the meat). The mushrooms I always add in the pan. The onions (and optionally garlic) I sometimes put in with the marinade and sometimes don't, depending on what I'm using and how heavily I want it flavored.

I prefer to cut onions in half then slice it, so I end up with half moons of onions and these break up into strips in the pan. I find the strips easier preferable to chopped just for eating method and texture. If you have onion haters in your household, you can just use onion raw or skip it completely. I don't eat a lot of onion and cooked has less onion "taste" to me than raw, hence my always cooking it.

Mushrooms you wash and slice (be sure you cut off any dirty ends) or buy ones already cut and sliced. I far prefer the consistency of fresh for this to canned. But if you need to hurry, go ahead and be lazy.

Add other stuff if you think it mixes in well. Whatever works for you.

The Actual Cooking

Shortly before it is time to eat, I heat up a skillet with a little oil (or if I've done the herbs and oil thing on the meat, I just use that) and brown the meat and onions. Then I add the mushrooms and cook that stirring around until the meat is cooked appropriately (cut some of the biggest/thickest strips in half and make sure they're right for your taste and the meat type... with chicken and pork, I usually go for easily breakable with a dull wooden spatula). Add further flavoring of salt and pepper and whatever else suits your taste buds if needed.

The Salad Part

I like that I can prep the salad stuff a little at a time throughout the day and not do it all at once. With my health, spending an hour in the kitchen cutting stuff is very bad. Wash whatever needs to be washed and prep in shapes and sizes to suit your family. I generally have to cut or rip up the lettuce (leaf lettuce is SO much better than iceberg, especially if it is out of our own garden). Other people will prefer whole lettuce leaves. You can also mix the greens and add in rucola or spinach or go foraging and mix in some dandelion or whatever else works for you and yours.

Carrot or celery cut small gives a nice bite of crunch.

Tomatoes I cut into small chunks or half slices. If you are planning to actually serve the meal in pitas, you might find the sliced easier to construct.

We don't drain the feta cubes ahead of time but serve them with a fork for fishing out what you want, so only what we eat gets drained and the rest is protected in the liquid.

But add whatever else your family will enjoy in this kind of salad. We like fresh shelled peas when we have them or younger snow peas or similar if we have them in the garden.

Normal people probably would enjoy cucumber also. I must admit I would enjoy eating it, but the migraine that comes after just isn't worth it for me.

The Dressing

I find the dressing to be the most important part of the meal, especially when it comes to making it appealing for one who doesn't care for salad. We prefer a simple sour cream (creme fraiche, technically) based dressing with some herbs, salt and pepper, and maybe a bit of spices. Many people would enjoy a garlicky one, but my husband doesn't care much for strong garlic flavors and it can overpower everything else. So usually I do parsley or chives, preferably fresh, either separately or together along with salt and pepper and sometimes paprika. But experiment and try different things and vary it so next time you make this, you don't feel like it's the same thing again.

You want to mix this type of dressing at least a few hours ahead and it will taste better the second day.

If using fresh herbs, I find it easiest to bunch them up and cut with a clean pair of kitchen scissors. I usually put them into the container I will mix the dressing in first so if anything seems too big pieces, I can stick the scissors into the pile and cut it finer that way. We usually have parsley and chives in the garden.

Once the herbs are cut, I add some salt and pepper and anything else I am using and the sour cream then mix. I taste it then, but I won't really know if the taste is right until it has had time to sit and mix itself together. Be sure you save some unflavored sour cream so if it's too strong you can mellow it a bit.

Before serving, I do a taste test and consistency check on it. Especially if using dry herbs, you may want to add a little milk to thin it. And doctor especially the salt and pepper as needed. Add more sour cream if your herbs are too powerful for the tastes of your family. I prefer to err on the strong side, since it is hard to make it more flavorful at the last minute but far easier to mix in more sour cream.

And make more than you think you will need. You can alway use it as a dip for carrot sticks, zucchini sticks, whatever, or as a regular salad dressing if you actually have leftovers.

Serving

I generally serve this in a DIY construction fashion. Then people can add more or less to suit their tastes.

Prepare the pita bread or whatever, if anything, you offer in that department according to the usual directions for the product. I either use the oven or microwave them briefly then toast if I don't want to run the oven. I wish we had a toaster oven but it wouldn't fit well in our kitchen. And I cut them in half because of how we eat them.

So heat them while finishing up cooking the cooked part and put all the various salad stuff on the table. If you decide to mix your salad in advance, don't add the dressing since it will settle and some people will want more than others.

We usually use soup bowls to eat this and pile in lots greens and veggies then add a little of the cooked part on top and top with dressing. Then stir it around or not as suited. I shove as much of it as I can into my pita and eat that. My husband eats his with a fork and munches his pitas on the side.

Save a bit of pita to mop up any yummy dressing that has stuck to your dish. You wouldn't want to waste any of it.

If you're avoiding carbs, just eat it as a salad.

Conclusion

So yes, this is really simple and not much of a recipe, but maybe it puts a meal together in a way you haven't thought about. And maybe it will work for your rabbit food hater like it does for mine.

If you want dessert, a bit of ice cream or, for a healthier choice, some cold fruit like seasonal berries or a cut up watermelon that's chilled in the fridge.