Summer Food Practices - Cooking Workshop

This post is a part of Sprig & Vine’s #100daysofSummer program: your warm weather guide to eat well, drink up, cool down, and chill out. Expect easy breezy recipes, hydration 101, wellness tips, and healthy living ideas all summer long.

With the onset of the peak summer in June, it’s hard to find inspiration to cook and eat healthy. It’s a time when you crave lighter, fresher, healthier meals that won’t leave you feeling sluggish afterwards, and is also enjoyable to eat in the heat. It’s always a toss up between wanting to make healthier food choices, but finding a way to do so with minimum fuss. Especially when the last thing you want to do right now is to spend long hours in the kitchen slogging over a stove.

We figured that others like us will be struggling with the same thing, so we hosted our first cooking workshop – summer food practices – for those who were looking to find ideas and inspiration on what to cook all summer long. The goal of the workshop was to make easy, breezy summer-inspired recipes using ingredients that are cooling, hydrating, and largely seasonal.

So, on June 23, a room of Sprig & Vine readers from Kolkata came together to learn how to make and eat delicious summer recipes that require minimum cooking time and fuss, made with seasonal and easily available ingredients.

In the workshop, we made:

~ Mango Gazpacho using seasonal alphonso mangoes

~ An oriental cucumber salad that is both hydrating and cooling

~ A Mediterranean barley salad (barley is an excellent grain for the summer season + it’s boiling water can be consumed as a hydrating summer beverage)

~ A black rice salad bowl with mangoes, avocados, and crunchy veggies

~ A chocolate chip zucchini bread (that really tasted like chocolate chip tea cake but healthier with the addition of the summer squash, zucchini)

Participants also learnt how to customise these recipes for their tastes and preferences, and based on what ingredients were available to them. Everyone got to taste all the dishes we prepared, and take home the recipes to recreate. Scroll through the pictures below to see some of our creations from the workshop!