Time to celebrate! With one purpose only-to bring family and friends together-Sheila Lukins presents Celebrate!, a full-color extravaganza of a book with 46 festive menus, 350 foolproof, with-a-twist recipes in the Silver Palate style, 200 color photographs, and throughout, the passion that's made her one of America's most creative cooks and best-loved food writers.

Here are menus to re-energize traditional holidays-for Thanksgiving serve Maple Ginger Turkey with a piquant Cornbread Chorizo Stuffing. Menus that will turn impromptu gatherings into yearly events--a hearty selection of bowl foods for Super Bowl Sunday, a red-white-and-blue menu for a Memorial Day barbecue, an easy weekday Cozy Dinner for Two. And menus that will inspire whole new reasons to throw a party--The Big Raise (featuring a Blushing Lobster Cocktail), When Spring Has Sprung, The First Summer Tomatoes, a Celebrate Morocco Dinner with Moorish Carrot Soup, Lamb Tagine, Orange Flower Sorbet. Celebrate! is a blueprint for joy, making any time the right time to celebrate and showing just how to pull it off.

Does The Silver Palate Cookbook ring a bell? Or The New Basics Cookbook? That's Sheila Lukins, with partner Julee Rosso, back in the days of making a major splash in the food world. What had been an upscale take-out shop became a brand, a series of books, and a line of specialty foods. Lukins went on to become food editor of Parade magazine. And she never slowed down on the cookbooks, producing on her own All Around the World Cookbook and USA Cookbook. Now her legion of fans can welcome Celebrate! Like all the others, it's a big book: 350 recipes, 200 color photographs, 480 pages.

"I'm in the mood to celebrate," Lukins crows. "It's the kind of joyous mood that makes me happy to call friends and family and invite them over for good food, good conversation, and good cheer! It's the kind of mood that makes needing a reason to celebrate...." Should you find yourself banging around for a reason to celebrate, relax: Lukins provides 43 of them. She hits all the major holidays--Christmas, Mother's Day, Passover, Superbowl. And then she witches up come celebrations you probably wouldn't think up on your own--Celebrate India, for example, or Celebrate Fresh Blueberry Breakfast. This is a book of menus and clustered recipes, which is handy if you don't want to think through an entire meal. Nothing's too demanding, flavor remains the bellwhether, ingredients will be in easy reach. Piece of cake. Piece of Devil's Food Cake, for that matter. You'll find that along with Deviled Chicken Wings, Red Hot Short Ribs of Beef, Jicama Slaw, and Tangerine Sorbet when it comes time to Celebrate an Old-Fashioned Halloween.

Sheila Lukins has always been one to point the way. Sure, celebrating with food and family and friends is obvious. But Lukins moves it all up to the next level, with bold splashes of color. If you make celebration a part of your everyday life, she's saying, you'll surround yourself with everything in life that's worth celebrating. Good food is certainly part of that living equation. --Schuyler Ingle

Celebrated cookbook writer Lukins (co-author, The Silver Palate and The New Basics) delivers a glossy full-color volume encompassing almost all the possible celebrations in life. Following the year from a New Year's Day Breakfast through an Academy Awards Bash to Chanukah and Christmas, she then continues with the myriad of life-affirming occasions-new job, graduation, bridal shower. Each celebration is prefaced with a menu and description of the dishes, often with a suggestion for presentation that is sure to enhance the occasion. The recipes vary in complexity, but the clear instructions and the sprinkling of helpful tips put them within the reach of most cooks. As in her other books, Lukins delivers a wide range of delightful dishes drawing on modern, fashionable, traditional and international inspirations, from the simple yet effective Summer Corn Soup (Midsummer Night's feast), with its unusual use of lemongrass, to the appropriately named Devil's Food Cake for Halloween and a Luscious Leek Frittata that is sure to perk up any Sunday morning. For "The Big Raise," Lukins recommends an appetizer of Blushing Lobster Cocktail and a main course of Rich Man's Burgers with B‚arnaise Mayonnaise-served with Champagne Pauillac and the music of Dean Martin. In the end, home cooks won't be surprised to find Lukins high standard of the dishes and a nice variety of recipes.