Last month, I was carrying on about cookbooks and specifically about a round up of 25 Beautiful Old Cookbooks on Abebooks and for a while I was all about cookbooks “of a certain age” (and subsequently spent some considerable time looking at vintage community cookbooks – community cookbooks being among some of my favorites since you can pretty much assume that these are recipes that have gotten a considerable workout from the contributor.

But you know – I like shiny and new cookbooks as well and so when I saw 10 Top Summer Cookbooks on the nprnews twitter feed, I clicked over right away.

Not unsurprisingly, my book list just got longer and now includes “Porch Parties” for two reasons.

A) because I need some new cocktails to keep happy hour from becoming too one note and

B)  because after years of saying I was going to do up my terrace, I actually did.  Now it is more an outdoor room than it has ever been and I intend to use it as such.

All of which is a round about way of asking – what is your favorite summer cocktail and refreshing summer snack and/or treat? Me? I’ve been slowly developing a new cocktail called a cranky apple. It’s not perfected yet but I am committed to thorough testing (at least until the vodka and cran-apple juice run out).