With the scorching temperatures we’re experiencing these days, raise your hand if you feel like getting into the kitchen. Then again, with electricity and gas costs reaching increasingly prohibitive heights due to current geopolitical tensions, getting near stoves or appliances becomes anything but inviting.

But can we create tasty, healthy, nutrient-rich dishes without turning on anything that generates heat? It’s a gamble we’ve taken ourselves and we’re showing you that it can be done – you just have to choose the right recipes and follow the seasonality of the ingredients. So let’s stop chatting and start (not) cooking to be more sustainable in our kitchen.

Breakfast

To start the day with the right determination and with a balanced intake of nutrients, we start with a good no-cook overnight porridge enriched with fresh (we chose strawberries, but all good) and dried fruits, oilseeds and organic peanut butter.

This recipe, vegan and lactose-free since the vegetable drink is used, is also suitable for people with gluten intolerance: just replace the classic oatmeal with gluten-free flakes and you’re done.

As an alternative to porridge, we can prepare a delicious chia pudding (“chia pudding”), again without cooking: chia seeds are rich in beneficial properties and are also very satiating – so ideal for a nutritious breakfast. This recipe is also vegan and gluten-free and can be enriched with fresh fruit or cocoa powder.

Snack

Let’s cut our appetite mid-morning with a colorful and fragrant smoothie made with fresh fruit: strawberries, melon, peaches… the summer season offers us an infinite number of flavors to satisfy the most demanding palates. To give body and creaminess to the smoothie, we suggest you mix fresh fruits with a frozen banana: it will give a fantastic creamy texture!

Lunch

For lunch, we suggest a plate of carrot “spaghetti” with pistachio and basil pesto, a raw recipe that can be prepared in a few minutes and that will seduce young and old alike with its color and crunch. Remember that eating raw vegetables allows you to fill up on vitamins and “volatile” nutrients that would be lost with cooking.

If you are not a carrot lover or if you want to reproduce the idea with other vegetables, you can try making your zucchini noodles.

To the raw starter, we can combine a salad of seasonal vegetables (strictly raw), enriched with a handful of legumes (we can use canned beans, lupins or fava beans) and a bit of oilseed to give crunch and fill up with precious omega-3 fatty acids.

Snacking

It’s time for a snack: a wooden skewer is enough to create a healthy and colorful snack, also suitable for children for this delicious shape. We are talking about fruit skewers, to enrich with the fruits we like most and decorate with dried fruit seeds, such as pistachio or hazelnut.

Dinner

Why not end the day with a tasty chickpea hummus spread on slices of fresh bread? Nutritious and filling, this dish of oriental origin guarantees the right amount of vegetable protein thanks to its main ingredient, chickpeas.

Its preparation is very simple: you just need a jar of pre-cooked and well rinsed chickpeas, a little lemon juice, a little tahini sauce (an oriental sauce made of sesame seeds, available in the most popular supermarkets but you can omit it if you don’t have it at home), salt, oil and a clove of garlic.

We then conclude the day with a sweet hug, strictly no-bake: we make a fresh coconut and lime cheesecake with Greek yogurt. If you don’t like the pungent taste of lime, you can choose from many other no-bake dessert recipes.

There you go! Even with different meal choices, you can become more sustainable in your lifestyle. How about you? What are the steps you’ve already taken towards better sustainability? Let us know in the comments below.