When I was pregnant with my first child in the very hot midwestern months of July, August and September, I worked in an office as a temp. My placement company required us to wear pantyhose. To this day the word pantyhose kind of makes me want to find a cliff and hurl myself off it.

The process of putting those horrible casings on my legs each morning in our non-air conditioned house was the most horrible part of being pregnant and that’s saying a lot since my pregnancy also included a 28 hour forceps delivery.

I feel pretty much the same about cooking anything in my house during the hottest part of the summer. So we’ve been relying on dinners which use the grill and/or our stove top.

Family Fun has launched a monthly meal planner I’ve been using to plan our meals. We don’t follow it exactly, especially since I don’t love crockpot dinners and have very picky diners, but I’ve been loving the inspiration and so many simple recipes. For this meal I used the meal plan for July 18th. We made the kebobs, noodles and instead of the green bean casserole (Quote my husband and children, “GROSSSSSS!”) we had steamed broccoli.

This was a quick meal to put together and pretty painlessly included the kids. I whipped up the marinade and used my trusty lidded Tupperware bowl so my resident shaker could do his thing.

The kids also helped thread our kebobs making pretty great grossed out faces while they did so.

But they overcame it all and we ended up with a plate full of kebobs.

This meal was a big hit, so much so that I should have doubled it. When we make it again I’ll make more, will start a little earlier so we can let it marinate for a bit longer and we probably won’t use stew beef because it was a little tough.

This is a great quick meal which best of all doesn’t heat up your kitchen!

In other quick cooking summer news, make sure you check out Mark Bittman’s 101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less. Some good inspiration although you may find some ideas are not exactly kid-friendly, unless your kid likes sardines, then you’re all set.