Suzanne Goin

This fried chicken from chef Suzanne Goin of LA’s A.O.C. gets a spicy boost in both the marinade and the breading.

NOTE You will probably have some brisket left over (unless your friends eat like mine!). It reheats beautifully and is also great for sandwiches and hash.

Editor's note: Use this sauce to make Suzanne Goin's Sticky Toffee Pudding with Blood Orange, Tangerine, and Whipped Crème Fraîche .

NOTE You can make the toffee sauce ahead of time and warm it up when you are ready to use it.

Adding egg yolks, cream, and sugar transforms a standard crust into something almost cookie-like. Freeze the second crust for later use.

No more dry bird! Goin prepares the breast and legs with distinct cooking techniques, resulting in unbelievable flavor and texture for each part: The breast is brined overnight before roasting, and the legs are cooked in duck fat and left to confit until fall-off-the-bone tender. Ask your butcher to remove the legs and thighs for you.

Celery root and potatoes are a mash made in heaven. Transfer cubed potatoes and celery root to a bowl of water as soon as you cut them to keep them from turning brown.

This tart is a tradition-forming mix of caramel, crunchy pecans, and melted chocolate. Be sure to let it rest for 30 minutes before serving.

A recipe for dates and Parmesan in a relish over roasted squash? Don't knock it till you try it.

Crisp around the edges and soft in the center, this side dish will please everyone at the table.

These savory, and slightly sweet, greens are also great served with pork.

In this aioli recipe by L.A. chef Suzanne Goin, she provides this tip: "Add a thin drizzle of oil and whisk like crazy."

This recipe is a lifer. I’ve been making it for more than 20 years, and every time I try to file it away, someone inevitably comes along asking for it. I brought it to my first staff get-together when I was working at Chez Panisse and, from then on, for all of the parties that followed, when I would even think of making something different, my friends and coworkers would cry out for this caramelized chocolate bread pudding. A few years later, the bread pudding gained an East Coast fan club, too. I was working at Alloro, a tiny restaurant in Boston’s Italian district. Back then, the Mafia owned all the local cafés and had a monopoly on the dessert-and-coffee crowd. Whereas the other (probably wiser) restaurants on the street obeyed the unspoken law of not selling dessert, at Alloro we broke the rule and secretly served this bread pudding to our in-the-know customers. We worked hard to keep the highly requested dessert under cover, and it seems we succeeded: both the recipe and I are still around. A few things make this bread pudding better than most. I love custards and am often disappointed by bread puddings with too much bread and not enough pudding. So be careful to use just a single layer of brioche, which creates a crispy crust but won’t absorb all the rich, silky custard underneath. Once you break through the caramelized, toasty top layer and dig down through the luscious custard, a treasure of melted chocolate awaits you at the bottom.

The colored beets and bright green arugula in this dish make for a visually stunning presentation. The sweet roasted beets marinated in lemon vinaigrette play off the pure white fish and horseradish cream. Look for a few different types of beets, such as golden beets and Chioggia beets, and dress them separately, so the dark ones don't bleed their juices onto the lighter ones. In the spring, you could make this dish with wild salmon.