Starter

From the Bay View Restaurant at The Inn at the Tides, where these cakes are served with a chopped tomato and basil salad.

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

The garlic is added in two lots here to get two different flavors. The first amount is sautéed with other vegetables at the beginning of the recipe in good Italian or Spanish fashion. The second goes in near the end to provide a bite. The tomatoes provide most of the liquid.

These easy-to-make flatbreads are a terrific treat for picnics and tailgate parties.

Our recipe makes plenty of sauce for two meals, so enjoy some with this menu and freeze the remainder for another time. The sauce is also great over tortellini, penne or fusilli. You can find the convenient prepared ravioli in the refrigerator section of most supermarkets.

Adding potatoes to the puree reduces the amount of cream needed to give this soup its thick, creamy texture.

Masa Harina is an ingenious addition to these savory shellfish cakes from chef George Mahaffey of The Restaurant at The Little Nell in Aspen.

The creation of chef Monique Barbeau of Fullers at the Sheraton Seattle Hotel & Towers. Serve the terrine as an appetizer with toasted bread, or as a cheese course accompanied with a glass of Port.

These innovative latkes are great as a first course, side dish or entrée. Complement them with chutney and yogurt.

Apples and apple cider lend a pleasant sweetness to this beautiful soup.

The broth can be served on its own as a light starter with or without the vegetables in it. It can also be used in recipes calling for canned vegetable broth.

This uses the same ingredients found in boudin blanc, the classic French white sausage. Start two days before serving.

These savory pancakes can be an appetizer, a side dish or a meatless main course.

A second vegetarian wheat soup, this is well worth trying. The recipe calls for winter wheat berries, but it could just as easily be made with spelt. The cooking time difference is minimal. If cooked wheat berries or spelt are on hand, simply add 9 cups (2.25 liters) water to 2 3/4 cups (360 g) cooked berries and continue from there.

At the restaurant Charlie Trotter bakes these small soufflés in thimble-shaped molds and sets them atop rounds of his own dried-fig brioche. Although he likes to use white Muscat grapes for the sauce, the recipe works well with any color or variety of grape. We used red seedless grapes, and they yielded a beautiful dark-pink sauce.

This recipe can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

The tomato topping for these crostini is based on that of a "fettunta pomodoro" (a variation of bruschetta made with whole-wheat peasant bread) sampled at Florence's Cantinetta Antinori, owned by the well-know winemaking family. To create visual variety for our presentation, we have made half of the crostini with the black olive paste on top and the rest with the red tomato mixture on top. Those who prefer a simpler recipe can sprinkle all of the bread slices with Parmesan before toasting (doubling the amount of cheese) and top all of the crostini with the tomato mixture and then the olive paste.

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.