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From This Week's Show

• Creamy Oyster Stew
• Meatballs and Spaghetti for Romance
• A Simple Tomato Sauce

Featured Recipe

• Cinnamon Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Garlic

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  Reprinted from Cook This Now by Melissa Clark. Copyright © 2011, Melissa Clark, Inc. Published by Hyperion. Available wherever books are sold. All Rights Reserved.
  
  

  Yield: Serves 4

  As soon as the first new crop of sweet potatoes hits the market stands, I bring a couple home to roast up until the tubers turn honeyed and velvety and just beg for a knob of butter or a drizzle of good olive oil to set off their plush orange flesh.

  These days there are dozens of sweet potato varieties floating around the market, and I’ve tried as many as I see, including gentle white sweet potatoes, richly sweet red jewel yams, and tiny baby sweet potatoes with delicate skins. All of them have their charms, but my favorites are the so-called garnet yams, which arrive in the market in October, then disappear right after Christmas like a fleeting, edible gift.

  I usually bake my sweet potatoes plain with just oil and salt. They really don’t need any other embellishment. But last year, after successfully roasting some Yukon Gold potatoes with a broken-up cinnamon stick and unpeeled garlic cloves strewn on the top, I decided to apply that same method to my pretty garnet sweets. It was one of those suddenly obvious, why-haven’t-I-done-this-before combinations. The cinnamon added that familiar, autumnal scent that made the sweet potatoes taste like Thanksgiving, while the garlic lent a caramelized, candy-like note that was about a million times tastier than marshmallows—at least if you ask me.

• My Go-to Beef Daube

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  Excerpted from Around My French Table: More Than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan
  
  

  Yield: Makes 6 servings

  We all need a great beef stew in our cooking back pocket, and this one’s mine. It’s fairly classic in its preparation — the meat is browned, then piled into a sturdy pot and slow-roasted with a lot of red wine, a splash of brandy, and some onions, garlic, carrots, and a little herb bouquet to keep it company. It finishes spoon-tender, sweet and winey through and through, and burnished the color of great-grandma’s armoire.

  I call this dish a daube, which means it’s a stew cooked in wine and also means that it’s made in a daubière, or a deep casserole, in my case, an enamel-coated cast-iron Dutch oven. However, a French friend took issue with the name and claimed that what I make, while très délicieuse, is not a daube, but boeuf aux carottes, or beef and carrots. She’s not wrong, but I’m stubbornly sticking with daube because it gives me the leeway to play around.

  My first-choice cut for this stew is chuck, which I buy whole and cut into 2- to 3-inch cubes myself. Since the meat is going to cook leisurely and soften, it’s good to have larger pieces — larger than the chunks that are usually cut for stews — that will hold their shape better. (If you’ve got a butcher, you can ask to have the meat cut at the shop.)

  If you’re serving a crowd, you can certainly double the recipe, but if the crowd is larger than a dozen, I’d suggest you divide the daube between two pots, or put it in a large roasting pan and stir it a few times while it’s in the oven.

  Be prepared: See Storing for how to make the daube ahead — a good idea.

• Chocolate-Avocado Mousse Martinis with Fresh Raspberries

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  Reprinted from If It Makes You Healthy: More Than 100 Delicious Recipes Inspired by the Seasons by Sheryl Crow, Chuck White and Mary Goodbody.
  
  

  Yield: 3 to 4 servings

  From Sheryl Crow: I love it when this is on the menu because it appeases any craving I might have for chocolate. And you would never have guessed that Chuck used avocado to thicken the mousse and that it would make it so delicious. Avocados are mild and sweet enough to blend seamlessly with the chocolate. This is super-healthful: no eggs, no cream, no white sugar in this mousse, and yet it's absolutely glorious.

• Skillet Asparagus with Manchego and Sherry Vinegar

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  Prep time: 15 min

  Cook time: 10 minutes

  Total time: 25 min

  Yield: 4 servings

  Asparagus take to the easiest kind of cooking. A few minutes in boiling water turns them tender with a little crispness still intact, then it's a case of how you want to flavor them.

  This is a Spanish take — Sherry vinegar and furls of Manchego cheese with olive or walnut oil. If you'd like, you could warm smoky Spanish paprika in the oil for a kick.

  Cook to Cook: Because asparagus overcook in a blink, I like to cook them spread out in a skillet of boiling water. This way I can pierce a stalk to see if it's tender crisp and get the stalks out of the water fast. Always slightly undercook asparagus because once they are drained (and even rinsed in cold water), they will continue cooking.

  The recipe also explains how to handle a bundle of stalks that vary in size.

• Roasted Cauliflower with Fennel-Chile Dry Rub

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  The recipe is adapted from Modern Spice by Monica Bhide (Simon & Schuster 2009).
  
  

  Prep time:

  Cook time:

  Total time:

  Yield: Makes 2 Servings

  I have made cauliflower every which way: I’ve blanched it, sautéed, boiled it, mashed it, deep-fried it, and eaten it raw. Until I read about it on eGullet.org, though, I never knew I could roast it. This recipe really brings out the richness of the cauliflower and matches it perfectly with the robustness of the spices. I use my fennel rub along with a few other spices. If you have sea salt, it works really well with this recipe. The cauliflower tends to shrink when roasted, so one head of cauliflower is about right for 2 servings.