20 Best Summer Drink Recipes by Betty Crocker - REVIEW

Goodreads Description:
Enjoy Sumer Sipping with Refreshing Drinks

Photo of Every Recipe

Summer and the sound of ice cubes clinking just go together, and the cool drinks here are perfect all through the warm months. Serve Frosty Iced Caramel Capuccino and Lemon-Ginger Tingler on a hot day; enjoy breakfast in a glass with Super-Athlete Spinach Smoothies or a Peanut Butter-Banana Smoothie. And come cocktail hour, whip up a Thai-Basil Mojitarita or a pitcher of White Wine Sangria. You'll find the best summer beverages right here.


MY TAKE:
3 Stars
45 pages
This book is one of those they sell as you are waiting in the supermarket line, you know the type I'm talking about, it's not a full-size magazine but is a little smaller, has a little thicker cover, and the pages are a little thicker, too. The size is larger than a mass-market paperback yet smaller than a magazine. This book is an impulse buy. It sounds good, looks good and the cover is pretty so it looks very inviting. You do not get enough time to read the entire Table of Contents, nor the recipes, so you grab it because it looks good.
So I've had this mini-ebook for a little while now, and with the mounds of snow and ice outside, the relentless snowstorms that have dumped three times the normal amount of snow we normally get setting records well beyond any record we have ever set in the past, and the below zero temperatures for weeks again setting records for the books, I HAD to read this 'summery book' NOW! I needed something 'summery' to fool my mind into thinking it is at least a little warmer outside than what it is! Did it work? Yes, to a degree! You'll see below!
First, TASTE IS SUBJECTIVE TO EACH INDIVIDUAL - WHICH MAKES RATING A RECIPE BOOK JUST AS SUBJECTIVE!
Now that I've gotten that out of the way, I can continue! LOL! Seriously, though, I only ended up liking FOUR out of the 20 of these recipes. Or at least I should say they 'sounded' good. I did not make one of these recipes, I only read them.
To give you a more detailed look at exactly what is in this book, here is the Table of Contents, clumped into 3 sections as it is in the book:
Coffee, Tea and Lemonade - 6 recipes which had 2 iced coffees, 2 lemonades, 2 iced teas.
Satisfying Smoothies - 7 recipes all with common fruits (no hunting for odd things) and a few with vegetables (vegetables in a smoothie? Yuck!).
Party Cocktails - 7 recipes (alcoholic beverages) two of the recipes you could substitute other ingredients instead of the alcohol, but in my opinion, the ingredients they have you substitute with would NOT give the same taste to the drinks.
My issue: If you don't drink alcohol and if you don't drink coffee or tea, then purchasing this book would be a waste of money. That's the gamble with recipe books, though, at least in my opinion.
This was also an ebook, which makes it much more to difficult to know what would be included in it. Not my type of recipe book to have. Plus, what do you do when the Kindle goes to sleep? Keep turning it back on in the middle of the recipe? No.
It's not like you can just flip through all the pages quickly at all. You would 'have' to buy it. If you could see the ingredient list, that would make a HUGE difference to know whether or not you would like this book or not. In my opinion, the best way to purchase a recipe book is to go 'to' a bookstore so you can flip through the pages to see if the book will be a good fit for you.
The only recipes that were left that I personally liked were four out of the smoothies section. Of the smoothies I did not like, one of the smoothies had SPINACH in it, called a Super-Athlete Spinach Smoothie. YUCK, for myself who does not like spinach! That smoothie didn't even seem like it belonged in this book. Why did the publisher include an athletic smoothie? Is it because they think we are more athletic in the summer than at other times of the year? Probably.
I'll say it again, as with ANY cookbook, taste IS subjective to each individual as well as rating a recipe book is just as subjective as well. Going with a 50/50 rating is good with this one because you don't know what other people will like. I compare this to snacking. Some people like to snack with salt and others like sweet. So this is why my 3 star rating. Had there been better recipes that appealed to more people, I would have rated it higher, but unfortunately, there were very few that really seemed appealing, at least to me.
In the ONE chapter that appealed to me, Satisfying Smoothies, only two out of the seven recipes appealed to me, so that kind of shows you how hard it is to judge an 'ebook' for it's recipes as compared to a print book. Just a hint for you.
I did look at all the recipe's ingredients, and ALL of the ingredients are available in "any" grocery store! Isn't that wonderful! No running around going to specialty food stores!
As with any recipe, read them thoroughly before you start to make them. I did notice that there were some things you needed to prepare ahead of time, or it would be nice to have them ready, at least.
One more thing - you know when the heat first turns on, (gas forced air) and it stirs up the cold air in the room? Well guess what I thought? Ooooo, brrrr! It's cold in here! The "AIR" is up too cold! I had better turn it warmer! So . . . IT WORKED! This cookbook DID fool me into making me think it was summer with the air conditioning on!! Wow! That was a FIRST! I really truly mean what I just said! Koodles to summer books in the Winter!
Here's to YOU and may YOU think it's summer during the deep freeze of winter!