It’s too darn hot, wrote Cole Porter, in the days before air conditioning.

But even if you benefit from modern cooling system, it may still be too darn hot to turn on the oven.

Turn up the flavor—not the heat!

Pick up a copy of The No-Cook, No-Bake Cookbook, and avoid turning on the stove or oven during the heat of summer.

Featuring 101 good-for-you recipes—author Matthew Kadey is a registered dietitian—you can quickly assemble breakfasts, lunch and dinner mains and delectable desserts, including:

Hungry? Get your copy at Amazon.com. If you need summer house gifts, buy extras.

Tart cherry soup can be a starter or dessert.
Photo courtesy ChooseCherries.com.

This recipe is easy as can be, using tart cherry juice. You can serve it as a starter; we like it as a dessert, with an optional scoop of fruit sorbet: blueberry, lemon, lime, raspberry or strawberry, for example.

If you’re not adding sorbet, consider a garnish of fresh or dried cherries.

Prep time 20 minutes plus 2-4 hours chilling time.

RECIPE: TART CHERRY SOUP

Ingredients For 6-8 Servings

Preparation

1. GENTLY WHISK together tart cherry juice, red wine, sugar, cinnamon and lemon juice in a medium pot. Add frozen tart cherries. Heat over medium to high heat until mixture comes to a boil.

2. REDUCE heat to medium to low and let simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and allow to cool.
(Optional: Spoon tart cherries out and blend in a blender until smooth; add back to soup)

3. ADD vanilla and sour cream to cooled soup; stir to combine and chill for 2 to 4 hours in the refrigerator. Serve chilled with optional garnish.

Check out more cherry recipes from the Cherry Marketing Institute, ChooseCherries.com.

An artistic Greek salad from Stix
Mediterranean Grill in New York City.

Now that beautiful tomatoes are in season, slice them up in as many ways as you can, including in a first course Greek salad.

In Greece, what we call a “Greek salad” (more about that below) is served with every meal. So today’s tip is: Enjoy a Greek salad at home, regularly.

When you make your own, you can add as much feta, olives, pepperoncini and other favorite ingredients as you like.

Making your own lets you build a better salad in these ways, too:

Serve your Greek salad as a main meal, a smaller salad course, or as a soup-and-salad or sandwich-and-salad combo for lunch.

Here’s the Greek salad recipe, including the traditional red wine vinaigrette.

Food Trivia: In Greece, the feta-cucumber-onion-and-more salad is referred to as horiatiki, which translates to country/village/peasant salad. It is a common part of a traditional Greek meal, just as a lettuce and tomato salad was once a standard on the American dinner table.

Horiatiki doesn’t contain lettuce—that’s an American preference. In Greece, you’ll only see lettuce used at restaurants that cater to tourists.

An authentic horiatiki is a combination of all or some of the following: anchovies, bell pepper, capers, cucumber, feta cheese, Kalamata olives, onion, sardines and tomato. It is dressed with olive oil only—no vinegar—plus oregano, salt and pepper.

Feta is one cheese where bargains should be avoided. Less expensive feta is often over-salted to the point of unpleasantness. Some knock-off feta is dry and rubbery, with none of the crumbliness of the original.

Feta, made from sheep’s milk or a blend of sheep’s and goat’s milks, is dry-salted and aged in wood barrels. There they sit in a brine solution that was originally devised so farmers could preserve their product in the hot Mediterranean climate. The brine gives feta its characteristic tang.

A quality feta goes through a four-month maturation, developing a creamy, rich, complex flavor.

According to Murray’s Cheese, only 2% of feta consumed in the U.S. actually hails from Greece. The economic collapse of Greece has put many traditional artisans out of business.

Top quality imported Greek feta is available from Murray’s Cheese.

A quality feta should be briny, tang and crumbly. You deserve to experience the best!

More Food Trivia: Feta been made at least since Homer’s time, the 8th century B.C.E.: He described it in The Odyssey.

The word feta, meaning slice, came much later, in the 17th century. It likely refers to the slicing of cheese before it is placed in barrels to age.
  

[2] Freeze your own Prosecco pops, and enjoy this light sparkler straight or in a cocktail (photo © Freixenet).

…and enjoying glasses of Prosecco, the Italian sparkler, garnished with boozy ice pops.

The Conrad Hotel in New York City, part of the Hilton empire, offers a tempting lineup of boozy pops at Loopy Doopy, its rooftop bar. (It looks neither loopy nor doopy, but Hamptons-inspired).

The ice pops are made from fruit purée and spirits and served in a goblet of Prosecco. Ice pop flavors include:

 
Loopy Doopy partnered with People’s Pops, a local artisan ice pop maker, which makes the boozy ice pops exclusively for them.

And there’s more fun: Throughout the 2014 summer season, those enjoying Prosecco & Ice Pop cocktails will discover various prizes revealed on their ice pop sticks. Prices range from something as small as an appetizer to a complimentary weekend stay for two in the hotel’s 1,500-square-foot Conrad Suite.
 
 
MAKE YOUR OWN POPS

You can make your own alcohol-infused ice pops with fruit juice and fresh fruit.

Alcohol doesn’t freeze well, so add just a teaspoonful to each pop mold.

Waiter, we’ll have another, please!

Hailing from northeast Italy’s Veneto region, Prosecco is the name of the village where the Prosecco grape—now known as the Glera grape—originated. Other local white grape varieties, such as Bianchetta Trevigiana, can be included in the blend.

The wine can be frizzante—just slightly fizzy, sometimes bottled with a regular cork to be opened with a corkscrew—or spumante—very fizzy, bottled with the mushroom-style cork and cage or something similar.

The wine is often labeled Prosecco di Conegliano Valdobbiadene, after its appellation.
 
Prosecco is affordable, light-bodied for hot summer days, and something you should be sipping now.

Enjoy them in simple preparations to let their luscious flavor shine: in salads or on sandwiches, for example. One of the easiest yet most popular ways to enjoy them is in a Caprese salad.

You can also get creative: Instead of piling the slices of mozzarella and tomato in a stack or spreading them in a fan, make the deconstructed Caprese salad shown in the photo. All you need apart from the standard ingredients (see below) are red and yellow tomatoes (or green, orange or purple—heirloom tomatoes offer a rainbow of options) of different sizes, and both large and small basil leaves.

While you’re at the farmers market, pick up some exotic basil instead of the standard: dark purple opal basil, lemon basil or sweet Thai basil, for example.

CAPRESE SALAD HISTORY

Insalata Caprese (salad in the style of Capri) is a favorite of many people—perhaps all the more precious because one of its four ingredients, tomatoes (combined with basil, mozzarella di bufala and olive oil) are splendid for such a short period of each year.

Basil is indigenous to Italy and mozzarella and olive oil have been made since ancient Roman times (olive oil is actually much older). The other key ingredients arrived much later:

 
However, insalata caprese became popular throughout the Western world after it became a favorite of King Farouk of Egypt, who discovered it during the a vacation to Capri in the 1950s (and probably invented the first insalata caprese sandwich—said to be his favorite way of eating it).

At some point, balsamic vinegar was offered as an addition to the plain olive oil (although fine olive oil as the sole condiment is sufficiently flavorful). Caprese salad is also called insalata tricolore, referring to the three colors of the Italian flag (green, white and red).

CAPRESE SALAD VARIATIONS

Outside of tomato season, radicchio, red bell peppers or sundried tomatoes can be substituted—as well as fruit, such as:

 
Vegans can enjoy a Tofu Caprese Salad, and those who don’t like mozzarella (is there anyone?) can make a Goat Cheese Caprese.

You can also make a Caprese Pasta Salad.
 
So, what’s for lunch?

 
*Source: Consorzio per la Tutela del Formaggio Mozzarella di Bufala Campana. This is the current best historical guess. The history of mozzarella di bufala.