Customer Rating: 
Summary: I never leave for work without this book!
Comment: I highly recommend this book for anyone who loves to cook for friends or family. I spend most of my time cooking for strangers on private boats but I always receive fabulous feedback on any recipes from this book. Bake "Dain's Grandmother's Carrot Cake" for your next gathering with friends and you will be the star of the meal! The recipe is incredibly easy and sinfully good. I make it in a sheetcake pan and it slices up nicely for dessert portions.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Be famous for your dinner parties!
Comment: Go out and buy this book and you will be famous for your dinner parties. I have had this book for a while and I have cooked almost everything in it. The lasagne is to die for and there are even recipes for drinks. There is everything you need to be a successful dinner party host. Sally Sampson takes all the anxiety out of having people over for dinner.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: a great jump start
Comment: The idea behind this cookbook is great -- take some of the mental obstacles away from entertaining by getting money and time out of the way. In the end the author accomplishes this goal. This book is great for inspiration to 'just do it' when it comes to dinner parties.That being said, her cooking definitely has its limits. There are 26 menus, all including a main course, side dishes, either an appetizer or a salad, and a dessert. Personally, my cooking focuses a lot on desserts, so I couldn't help but notice that she totally cops out on the dessert portion of the book. There are several cookie recipes in the back of the book and she falls back on those for a number of her 'desserts.' Meanwhile, in trying to list easy dessert recipe, there's not a single pie!! My advice: don't serve cookies for dessert. Just get some fresh fruit and cream if you don't want to think about it. Or substitute your own favorite dessert recipes for hers.
One minor thing: she mentions that she and her food processor are attached at the hip, and she does use her food processor in a lot of recipes. If you have one, great. If you don't, mostly you can get around it, no problem, but just be aware.
Nonetheless, the book is good. Her philosophy of making things ahead and understanding that the real reason for a dinner party is to have friends over is great, and she sticks to the philosophy in her recipes. The carrot cake as mentioned in another review is good. As is the chicken saltimbocca, the sherry flank steak and her mashed sweet potatoes. also i like the butternut squash with apples and walnuts, etc. Some good recipes.
If you need a bite sized way to jump start your entertaining aspirations, this is a good place to start. Also, you may find inspiration in thinking "I can do better than this!!" as I did. Go for it!
If you don't mind doing a little more reading and a little more of your own thinking, there are some great easy menus and a similar philosophy to be found toward the back of Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. Also there's Barefoot Contessa Parties -- a similar philosophy but with a much more experienced author, great recipes and lots of pretty pictures. However, it doesn't have nearly as many menus as $50, so take your pick.
Customer Rating:
Summary: the best dinner party cookbook for those on a budget
Comment: Try the incredible chocolate-bread pudding, yum!! Amazing.This is just a fab cookbook for those people who want to entertain, who want to impress their friends' taste buds, but just don't have the time or the cash to do so Martha Stewart fashion.
The menus I've tried all work so well together. This is my one cookbook that gets heavy usage, eventhough I've got all those Silver Palate ones too. Also having the menus makes it so easy to plan a dinner party, the recipes work very well together, saving you the time of searching cookbooks trying to figure out what goes well with what.
Customer Rating:
Summary: She's like a cooking coach...
Comment: I've been cooking my way through this book because she tells you what to do when, so that everything gets done on time and with no problems. The recipes are all easy and will make you feel very confident when you see the result, and I'm starting to get the hang of preparing meals on schedule - feels like she's coaching you all the way. I only gave 3 stars because although my roommate loves the dishes I make from it, I don't think they are the best recipes. They are good, but not great. Like, her recipe for Key Lime Mousse just tastes like flavored whipped cream. The chocolate date bars came out more like a cake texture, than a bar. The chicken recipes are overkill to my palate because her marinades are a ton of spices and herbs that go along with a nationality - Moroccan or Carribean for instance - and personally, I don't think it's a good idea to put so many spices in one dish, then you can't really savor them. I've also noticed errors in the directions that make it seem that perhaps some of the recipes started out as high quantity and the scaling down of them was not perfected. I will continue to use this book for practice though, because for that, it has been invaluable. When I've done all the menus in this book I think I'll have learned a lot about planning them myself, and then I can use whatever recipes I want! 1 other thing - she says to try not to buy ultra-pasteurized dairy products and I don't understand why -- this process is shorter than pasteurization and the end product is purer and tastes fresher.
