Beach House Dinners: Simple, Summer-Inspired Meals for Entertaining Year-Round by Lei Shishak - BOOK REVIEW

 

Beach House Dinners: Simple, Summer-Inspired Meals for Entertaining Year-Round  by Lei Shishak (2020, Skyhorse Publishing)

Beach House Dinners: Simple, Summer-Inspired Meals for Entertaining Year-Round is a pretty cookbook offering 80 recipes for the kind of food everyone loves to eat, focusing on dishes made to share. Whether you are making dinner for family or a dinner party for friends, Lei Shishak's new book is an excellent cookbook for easy, tasty recipes.

Because the theme is dinner, the chapters are divided by type of entrée: Poultry, Seafood, Read Meat, Pork and Ground Meat, Vegetarian, Pasta, Soups and Sandwiches, and Salads. Each recipe for a main dish comes with suggestions and recipes for what to serve with it to make a whole dinner. For example, Lei's recipe for Lemon Garlic Chicken includes instructions to roast quartered red baby potatoes with the chicken thighs and a recipe for a Shredded Brussels Sprouts side dish. Other recipes are a complete meal in themselves, like the scrumptious looking Shrimp and Potato Fiesta.

Lei Shishak is a chef, baker, and cookbook author in Southern California. She is the founder of the Sugar Blossom Bake Shop in San Clemente, California. Beach House Dinners is her fourth cookbook. As with her two earlier "Beach House" cookbooks, Beach House Baking and BeachHouse Brunch, the theme is good food by the beach. The book is filled with beautiful, dreamy pictures of beach life – picnics, seashores, palm trees, sun drenched cottages, and sun-bleached decks. But the book doesn't require summer and a beach house so much as evoke that summer-at-the-beach vibe everyone can enjoy, and enjoy year round.

Because the recipes are mostly for yummy, comfort food that anyone can make at home, Beach House Dinners would make an excellent gift for a new couple or a young person setting up house. Extra features that make it a good pick for a new cook are a list for a well-stocked home pantry, a list of kitchen tools to make all the recipes, a section of helpful tips, and lined spaces for notes after many of the recipes.

I am happy to add Beach House Dinners to my CookbookLibrary.

NOTES

Beach House Dinners is a perfect book for Labor Day weekend, but really does have year-round recipes great for entertaining friends or just cooking for family. 

WEEKEND COOKING

Hosted by Adventures of an Intrepid Reader

Weekend Cooking is a weekly blog event hosted by Marg at The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader. Beth Fish Reads started the event in 2009 and bloggers have been sharing book and food related posts ever since.