When in the kitchen in summer you must make as few movements as possible. It becomes a study in conciseness: you must chop your carrots not using your whole arm as you might do in winter but using a kind of gliding, circular motion with your wrist and some backbone provided by your forearm. You must move from your cutting board to the stovetop with the least number of pivots possible, and when there must stir like an oarswoman: once, twice, three times lifting from the bottom, getting everything as fully churned as you can because anything beyond that will have you sweating. Conciseness. Create as little extra heat as you can. You must remember this as you pluck mint leaves, must slice with forefinger and thumb flush against the stem -- must make a clean cut of the leaf entire.
You have tried to explain this heat many times many times to people not from here. The words always twist coming out of your mouth and you end up saying something like "The heat in the summer gets to you, it gets in your head," or, "People act different in summer." What you really meant to say is that the heat is violent. It mounts a sunup-to-sundown offensive, it descends from above and rises from where it has seeped into the asphalt and it traps you in the middle. It makes everyone move with a languidness that in this East Coast shrine to efficiency they would not otherwise indulge, but it traps that excess energy somewhere else, builds it up like steam in pockets all over your body.
You will find yourself adding more chiles, more hot sauce, more heat to everything you make. Whole jalapenos disappear into otherwise sensible and subtle Spanish tortillas; heaping tablespoons of red pepper flakes into mild carrot and ginger soup. What you reserve in your movements must explode outward in flavor -- to match that slow and stabbing heat.
