Sweet Potato Coconut Curry with Shrimp

I love the combination of sweet and spicy flavors in this luscious dish. Serve this over brown basmati rice and add a platter of steamed spinach lightly sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds to complete the meal. Yield: MAKES 6 SERVINGS ...

Cioppino

Cioppino is a specialty of Genoans in San Francisco, and it’s a riotous stew of all kinds of seafood cooked with vegetables, wine, and tomatoes (much like a bouillabaisse). My Uncle Jim makes it every year as soon as Dungeness crab comes into season in mid-November (the season lasts through May on the West Coast) and is readily available. Yield: Serves 6 ...

Seared Beef in Autumn Broth With Wasabi Cream

This dish began as a variation on a French recipe called boeuf à la fìcelle (literally “beef on a string”), which requires the cook to tie a string around some filet mignon and lower it into a pot of barely simmering broth. I tried it and was stunned by its blandness. It struck me as a scandalous waste of a very expensive cut of meat, and I was ready to junk the whole idea. Then Joanne, my collaborator on this book, noted that...

Mixed Wild Mushroom Soup

This is a wonderfully dramatic way to show off wild mushrooms. It’s almost a mushroom stew except that the mushrooms are sitting over a shallow layer of flavorful broth instead of being bound together with a thick sauce. In this recipe the mushrooms are sautéd with shallots, garlic, and parsley in olive oil. There are no hard and fast rules, so feel free to play around with different herbs or different cooking fats, such as butter or, best...

Coffee Brownies

You can make chocolate chunks by chopping a bittersweet chocolate bar with a knife. As with any baked item, always use a good quality chocolate and cocoa powder. Yield: Makes 9 to 12 Brownies ...