Easy Summer Food collects about 100 recipes that celebrate sunny days and seasonal ingredients in straightforward, tasty ways.  Regardless of where you live or spend your summers, Julz Beresford, Maxine Clark, Clare Ferguson, Silvana Franco, Elsa Petersen-Schepelern, Louise Pickford, Fran Warde, and Lesley Waters—six popular Australian and British chefs and food writers—pooled their considerable know-how to ensure your two or three months of hot, sun-drenched weather won’t be lost in an overheated kitchen, or in the drive-through lane at the local burger joint.

The book has nine sections, including summer standards like salads, picnics, and grilling as well as lighter and sunnier ideas for vegetables, fish, meats, pastas, dips, desserts, and sweets. I think many dishes are equally at home doing dinner for one as they are at a casual backyard party with friends.

Every dish is beautifully illustrated with full-colour photographs. Each image—sometimes casual, sometimes rustic, and occasionally elegant—lets readers feel like they are wandering through someone’s backyard party or cottage weekend. More importantly, the book’s well-written recipes come with logical and cleanly presented instructions.

The recipes themselves are globally inspired: Asian Barbecue Sauce with Chinese notes; Fragrant Herb Couscous Salad that mixes Moroccan and Lebanese cuisines; a classic French Salad Niçoise; and Grilled Mexican-styled Cornish Hens. For those who love Spanish tapas, there are a number of undemanding dishes to sample. From marinated anchovies to chorizo in red wine to marinated olives, any combination of these easy-to-prepare foods can are just what’s needed to avoid heat stroke when putting together a casual summer buffet supper.

I have a couple issues with this book. I don’t think the problems are show stoppers but, to some readers, they may be cause for consternation. It feels like a somewhat rushed American adaptation of a British or Australian cookbook—I haven’t seen the UK version, but some weights and measures seem a bit off. For example, when I used the requisite tablespoon of oil to sauté some shrimp, I found I needed an extra splash of oil to make the recipe work—perhaps I used larger shrimp than their recipe testers did, but I don’t know. I also wonder if produce size was taken into consideration when the recipes were converted—I know of visiting Europeans who think North American produce are massive siblings to what’s found in their local markets. And lastly, important information (ie. how to do measurements) is hidden—I accidentally found it on the copyright page.

I think the authors intended this recipe collection to be all things to all cooks. However, when using “easy” in a cookery book’s title, there’s an automatic presumption that all the recipes can be made by a novice cook. Whereas I think that’s technically true for this book, and can in some cases provide instant gratification for very little effort, half of Easy Summer Food’s recipes that I tried needed an experienced palate to provide either a sense of proportion or a bit of…interest: keeping a taste bud or two on alert for balance may be a little more necessary than usual.

And which recipes did I try? The book beckoned me to try more than I had time for. When I first read through it, I looked for four recipes to test. I marked more than 15 pages. Somehow, I narrowed my selections down to my original target number: