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Easy Summer Food: Simple Recipes for Sunny Days

By Sharon Cochrane

Reviewed by Christine Landry

Appeared in The Food Paper’s e-newsletter, June 2005 issue

Quite simply, Easy Summer Food: Simple Recipes for Sunny Days is a compact joy. This squat book gives the impression that a lot of care went into its presentation and organization with beautiful pictures and helpful asides that punctuate the volume throughout. For example, the seared squid with lemon and cilantro dressing has a note instructing cooks to pull out the stiff transparent quill of the squid that looks like “a little wand of plastic.” Rarely are cookbook instructions so descriptive and specific.

However, opening the book at random, you may find a recipe that has you questioning the title’s claim of simplicity. The paella, for example, lists sixteen ingredients, and one recipe has you kneading dough (and giving it time to rise) to make a pretty basic pizza Napoletana. Hardly easy, by many people’s standards. But simple recipes are mostly the norm in this book, and a few are so elementary that their inclusion hardly seems necessary, as is the case with fried squid Roman-style which has a basic flour-and-egg breading and little else. Yet the book has its inspired moments too, such as clam packages with garlic butter cooked in foil on the grill. The simplicity of taking an easy, well-known dish that’s nearly always steamed and transferring it to the grill was a bit thrilling. In fact, many of the dishes are exactly what you would hope for in warmer months. We liked the combination of the creamy avocado and salty prosciutto so much in the avocado salad that we added even more of both. A squeeze of lemon to sharpen the vinaigrette and a glass of Riesling to accompany the dish seemed to lower the temperature of the room on one warm summer night. The salad has already become a regular part of our summer repertoire.

The miso-broiled cod, on the other hand, could have been more flavorful, despite the appealing combination of ingredients for the marinade (soy sauce, sake, honey and miso paste). Still, one can hardly complain when an appetizing and healthy meal sits before you in the time it takes to boil rice. The cod took exactly eight minutes to broil, just as the book claimed, and the recommended bok choy stir-fried in the last few minutes completed the meal perfectly.

In addition, we appreciated the way the table of contents was so thoughtfully broken down. We have a tendency to eat less meat during the summer, and this book placed “fish, meat, & poultry” in a chapter all together, instead of separating them out, as most recipe books do in a way that has become out-of-step with the changing American diet. Instead, the table of contents boasts such chapters as “Grilling,” “Dips & Breads” and “Picnics.” The latter we especially appreciated since we are always on the lookout for tasty, portable foods for the picnic and barbecue social events that are inevitably a part of these months.

No need to labor away in a kitchen on a hot evening. Easy Summer Food lets you take advantage of summer by utilizing the ingredients of the season and minimizing your time cooking so you can enjoy the warm, blooming world outside your kitchen.