The weekend before last I was craving steaming stew after spending Sunday morning planting nasturtium at Shepparton in the sideways rain; on Monday just gone I was desperately seeking fresh salad ideas online.

We have yet to fire up our cooling this spring and got caught out.

Hot and bothered? Do NOT turn your oven on when you get home folk.

It was like Good Food on Facebook was speaking to me personally.

The last thing you need right now is to raise a sweat. Grab a rotisserie chook from your local supermarket or whip up a tasty, cool dinner featuring pantry staples such as tinned tuna.

I did not want to leave the house again and three out of the four people in our home don’t eat tuna. I decided to open the link, anyhow.

1) Neil Perry's corn fritters with jalapeno butter. Corn fritters are a Meat-free Monday dinner staple in our home. So much so, I’ve promised our daughters to take them off the menu for a few weeks. Too much of a good thing can be just too much of a thing!

2) Karen Martini's tasty cold soba noodles with beansprouts, soy and ginger. While these sounded delicious to me, I worried they might be a slightly hard sell to our five-year-old.

3) Grab a roast chook from your local supermarket for Neil Perry's roast chicken burger. I had already ruled out a car trip.

4) Jill Dupleix's all-American, super satisfying cobb salad with bacon and that roast chicken again. My regular muesli recipe comes from Dupleix but as a dinner option it would be an even harder sell than cold Japanese noodles.

5) Neil Perry’s kingfish with green beans, hazelnuts and brown butter. Truly tempting to me but alas I couldn’t reel in a kingfish in the kitchen!

6) Jill Dupleix's zucchini spaghetti. The crisper drawers contained every green vegetable – except zucchini – and six bottles of chilled Carlsberg. 

7) Neil Perry’s canned tuna with herb salad, capers and lemon dressing. Like I said, tuna ruled out 75 per cent of the household.

8) Neil Perry’s Vietnamese Chicken and Prawn Coleslaw. More uses for the absentee rotisserie chook.

9) Justin North's tasty summer tacos with avocado, prawns and chilli. One shellfish allergy in our home and another who thinks we live too far from the ocean for good seafood.

10) Baleadas with red beans and feta. It was promising until I read there were 18 ingredients in this dish; 19 if you counted the optional chilli salsa for serving. While Saturday nights could lend themselves to 19-ingredient main courses, Mondays rarely did.

With options running low and more hot and bothered than when I started out, I resorted to the depths of the downstairs deep freezer.

There I pulled out lamb cutlets and sausages; just the thing for a barbecue outside. Truly oven-free cooking.

While it breached Meat-free Monday, whichever way you looked at it, I simply postponed that to Tuesday this week only.

I served corn fritters with avocado on Tuesday. They went down a treat on the back of the promise of icy poles for dessert and a swim later in the week.

It’s not simply how you handle the heat in the kitchen.

It’s how you keep your cool under fire from the toughest food critics.