Entertaining

Excerpted from Lulu Powers Food to Flowers: Simple, Stylish Food for Easy Entertaining

Nothing says New England like a good old-fashioned clambake. This is a modern clambake, with lobster rolls substituting for the classic clams (and clam chowder on the side). And it's versatile: this party can be thrown indoors or outdoors, and almost every dish can be made ahead.

The best clambake I ever attended was on Temperance Island, a private island in Connecticut owned by my sister Molly's in-laws, Susan and Sandy Kellogg, affectionately known as Su-Su and Pops. The Kelloggs grew up on the water, and they open their house from April to November. The first time I visited, I felt as if I were in a Norman Rockwell painting. Sitting on the big, wide porches, digging steamers outside the front door at low tide, and living without electricity sends you back in time. We pulled our own lobster traps and had a feast of fresh lobster, clam chowder, and fresh corn.

Like most modern day, self-taught chef's I have, of course, heard of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. First published in 1896, it's currently in its' 13th Edition, which is pretty impressive since Fannie Farmer died in 1915. Granted cooking has changed a lot in the century since she first began inspiring young wives and mothers to create lovely meals at home.

She ran the original "test kitchen" at The Boston Cooking School, constantly reworking recipes until they were just right and eventually included in the cookbook. Who knows what she would make of all our fancy gadgets and time-saving devices, but after reading Fannie's Last Supper, I have a feeling she would have enjoyed the relative ease of cooking in a more modern time.

God knows delivering dinner in the Victorian-era was no small task, as was discovered by the book's author Chris Kimball, the founder of Cook's Magazine and host of America's Test Kitchen.

On the TV show Top Chef, contestants create dishes to impress the judges often with limited resources of time or money or ingredients. From a viewer's perspective, the biggest problem with the show is that you can't taste the food. Still I love it. Perhaps it's because I enjoy the challenging aspects of cooking--like every other home cook, I am challenged to use what ingredients I have and the techniques I know, to cook something delicious, day after day, night after night.

Sometimes I wonder if I would agree with the judges. And I wonder how good those cooked-in-a-flash dishes with barely any ingredients really taste. I may never bother cooking something sous vide, break down an entire side of beef or serve 200 guests in one evening, but I'm happy to say I can now duplicate various dishes presented in the quickfire challenges on Top Chef thanks to Top Chef: The Quickfire Cookbook. Top Chef: The Quickfire Challenge Cookbook features mostly recipes that home cooks can easily duplicate.

With grilling season about to begin in earnest, I was looking for a cookbook that could help freshen up our usual party fare. Sure you can buy salsa and hummus and already pre-marinated meat, but where's the fun – and bragging rights – in that? And though I love true BBQ, there is no grill master in our household. So as much as I yearn for tender, long-smoked ribs or sweet & saucy chicken, what I really needed was a book with simple, impressive, quick recipes to get the party started without days of effort.

Food Network Magazine 1,000 Easy Recipes definitely fits the bill. It covers everything from Breakfast through Dessert (even Cocktails) with clear instructions – some are so short they could be tweeted – utilizing easy-to-find, inexpnsive ingredients. The book is strewn with a fair share of lovely photographs, usually of the more colorful, "labor-intensive" recipes. Seriously though, I don't think many of them take more than a half an hour of prep or cook time. The first recipe I made was Hash-Brown Eggs. I'm a Breakfast whore. It wasn't complicated – I had everything on-hand already – but man did it hit the spot.