Mary Kay Andrews - The Beach House Cookbook

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The phrase beach house conjures up all kinds of magical images for me: morning walks along the shore, sun-splashed beach picnics, and outdoor showers followed by lazy late afternoons lolling in the shade, with yet one more foray back to the water late in the day. And then, for me the perfect beach house day is capped off with icy cocktails at sunset, followed by a dinner of fresh-caught seafood with sides of coleslaw and potato salad, thickly sliced tomatoes, and corn on the cob from the nearest farm stand, followed by a sinfully delicious dessertlemon bars? Or maybe just a stroll down the block for ice cream or gelato from the neighborhood parlor. After dinner, my favorite activity is a spirited board gameScrabble? Trivial Pursuit? Or my grandchildrens favorite, Yahtzee.

Growing up in St. Petersburg, Florida, as the second of five children, I lived a block away from Tampa Bay and thirty minutes away from the Gulf of Mexico beaches, but the idea of actually owning a beach house was considered pie in the sky for my hard-working parents.

However, for many years, we could, and did, rent a beach house for two glorious weeks every July. My familys preferred destination was a typical old-style Florida mom-and-pop tourist court calledand in retrospect, I love the ironyOcee Villas, at Indian Rocks Beach on the Gulf of Mexico. Our villa was a one-story concrete-block affair of around 800 square feet, with two tiny bedrooms and a single bath. But it had air-conditioning, which our own home lacked, not to mention a pool; a recreation hall with a Ping-Pong table, juke box, and a vacuum cleaner motorpowered player piano; and best of all, a seemingly endless stretch of sugar-fine white beaches. Our rented beach cottage was probably only twenty-five miles from our house in town, but to us, it was just as exotic a destination as the Italian Riviera.

My memory of the Ocee Villas is of sharing a rollaway bed or lumpy pullout sofa with my little sister, Patti, while Susie, the oldest in the family, got a bed of her own, and my younger brothers, Johnny and Timmy, were on twin beds in one bedroom, with my parents in the master bedroom. Looking back now, I marvel that my motherwho did all the cooking in our family of sevenconsidered this a vacation. Especially since the kitchen at our villa consisted of a tiny apartment-size electric stove; a balky, undersize fridge; zero counter space; and an eccentric array of kitchenware. Still, Mom was always up for a challenge, and somehow she managed to feed usand the hordes of assorted friends and relatives who dropped in at dinnertimewithout turning a hair on her frosted, teased bouffant.

Im sure we kids ate lots of baloney and peanut butter and jelly sandwicheswhile Dad snacked on liverwurst and Ritz crackers, which he regarded as a vacation delicacy. I know we had a charcoal grill, and that we had hot dogs and hamburgers with mounds of sweet, vinegary coleslaw and creamy potato salad. And deviled eggs. Always deviled eggs. Dessert was probably a fresh peach cobbler Mom made from bruised fruit she culled at our neighborhood A&P and bought at a deep discount, or my fathers favorite, banana pudding, or maybe a chocolate cake. The younguns washed dinner down with cherry Kool-Aid, my mother sipped her beloved Nestea Instant Tea between chain-smoking Kools or Salems, and Dad had his Big BlueBudweiser. We crowded around a Formica-topped table meant for a party of four, sunburnt, tired, chlorine-scented, and ravenous, and talked and teased and bickered until we fell into our beds, exhausted and already planning the next days big adventure.

Today, the Ocee Villas are gone, long since replaced by high-rise hotels and condo towers. My parents and two of my siblings are also gone, and greatly mourned. Those simple, salt-scented beach house memories are ones Ive sought to re-create ever since.

After I married my high school sweetheart, Tom, and we moved to Georgia and had two children of our own, we returned to those same Gulf beaches for many years, renting similar cottages.

Our beach house menus changed to suit our family. Because Tom is a gifted fisherman (I joke that he could catch a tarpon in a bathtub), our beach house meals usually included the days catch: flounder, speckled trout, redfish, orif hed had a really good daysnook, which is a notoriously wily (and delicious) game fish.

When our children reached school age, we often spent their Easter break in the Florida Panhandle town of Grayton Beach. Wed descend en masse with several neighborhood families, renting huge homes that slept up to twenty people. Each family was assigned a night to prepare dinner for the crowd, with one night reserved for dinner outusually at the Red Bar, a popular local hangoutand the last Saturday night was the assigned clean out the fridge night.

Ten years ago, after our children were grown and (mostly) gone, and we had time and (most importantly) resources, we finally turned to my dream of owning a beach house of our own. This time, the beach would be on Tybee Island, a mile-long barrier island off the coast of Savannah thats only a four-hour drive from our home in Atlanta. After a prolonged huntand three unsuccessful bidswe found a two-story concrete-block box, painted in circus shades of blue and yellow. It was stinky and rat-infested, and a squatter had taken up residence, but the price and size were right. It took nearly a year, but eventually we transformed that house into my dream of a throwback Florida beach cottage painted in a retro turquoise, complete with a hibiscus-pink front door. We furnished it with my basement full of hoarded estate-sale and flea-market finds and christened the house the Breeze Inn, after a fictional motel in my novel Savannah Breeze, which was set on Tybee. The very first step in our restoration project was ripping out the old kitchen. In its place, we planned a new galley space, and its centerpiece would be a huge old porcelain farm sink I found at an antique salvage yard.

As soon as we moved into the Breeze, Tom and I started cooking and inviting friends and family to join us around the heart-pine table wed had crafted from boards taken from our former house in Atlanta. And before long, that big sink became the perfect beach house bathtub for our first grandbaby, Molly. Two years later, after the birth of her little brother, Griffin, our three-bedroom house was feeling mighty cramped when the entire family joined us at the beach. We started searching for something bigger. Eventually, my friend Diane tipped me off that our forever beach house was on the marketand the price had recently been slashed.