Ricardo Larrivee has the kind of boy next door look and charm that has made him a print, radio and tv star. But his work is not just personality and appearance, his recipes are rigorously tested and edited.

Ricardo Larrivee is a neat guy. Passion to burn. Talent to project his love of food and its importance in the lives of Canadians. He wants everyone to know how to cook, and he wants everyone to sit down together and eat.

No time! Too much going on! You counter. According to this father of 3 whose successful Ricardo and Friends plays on Food Network Canada, whose magazine Ricardo and cookbooks are bestsellers, everyone deserves an hour to have dinner with family. About  half of it to cook, the rest to eat and spend time with these people you love most. Sitting around the table, Ricardo recounted, there might not be a lot of talk at the beginning. You know the situation: "What happened at school today", parent asks. Child's answer: "Nothing" and so it goes, but after a few minutes, real conversation began as food gets passed around and everyone relaxes. Kids learn how to help and to enjoy food, even as they take the requisite "one bite" of something new.

Ricardo was in Toronto recently to promote his newest cookbook, Ricardo, Meals for Every Occasion (Whitecap, $35), and together we had a public conversation as part of the arts program of First Canadian Place. He talked about how eating together generates conversation not just with family. For example, the idea for the handsomely photographed book, came out the kind of glow-time around the table at the end of a dinner with friends. They found themselves discussing the sometimes awkward, sometimes challenging entertaining situations they found themselves in and needed solutions. What do you do, for example, when people arrive before dinner and stay on? Or, stay over. What do you serve people who come from Europe and think Canadians eat wild food all the time. What's on the menu when the guests are always late, or when someone important, say your boss is coming for dinner, or when it's men only and they can't be trusted to follow a recipe?

Ricardo takes a lighthearted approach to these situations and the food, but the solutions are practical with just that touch of inventiveness that gets someone turning  the pages of the book have regular "Great idea" moments, as she patches a sticky onto the page.  Here are a couple of "Great idea" stickies you too might enjoy too.

A quick and easy appetizer tray with Dukka in the bowl at the top, and the Red Bell Pepper Spread bottom left. Good bread, olives and extra virgin olive oil give guests something to nibble on while you, the host, gets cracking with dinner.

Red Bell Pepper Spread

When friends and family drop in...and stay, a few quick recipes go a long way to keeping you smiling and still happy to see them. You love them, after all. Ricardo claims this recipe is too simple to be a proper recipe and tried adding all sorts of things. Eventually he gave up and went back to the original 4 ingredients. "Sometimes, simpler really is better."

4 red bell peppers, halved and cored

1/4 cup (50 mL) olive oil

Salt and pepper

1 With the rack in the top position, preheat the broiler. Line a baking sheet with foil.

2 Place the peppers on the baking sheet, skin-side up. Brush lightly with some of the oil. Broil until the skins blacken, about 15 minutes.

3 Place the peppers in an airtight container. Let cool and slide the skins off.

4 In a food processor, puree the peppers with the remaining oil. Season with salt and pepper. Serve with mini pitas, spread on slices of baguette as hors d-oeuvres or as a dip for crudites. 

. Makes 1-1/2 cups (375 mL).

Dukka

Strange name for a seed and nut combo originally written about by Claudia Roden in her landmark book, The Book of Middle Eastern Food  back in the late '60s. The book introduced North African and Middle Eastern food to a world that knew very little of its delights. In England, it created an enormous interest  and caught on in Australia. When she and I were both in Adelaide, Australia for the first Tasting Australia conference/celebration in 1998, she was intrigued to see one of her recipes from the book, the recipe for dukka, so popular and widespread, with so many variations - and so far from its origins. Ricardo tasted dukka in New Zealand, and comments that it's a way better paired with olive oil than the usual oil and balsamic.  "Super classy" is Ricardo's description.

2/3 cup (150 mL) whole blanched almonds

2 tbsp (30 mL) sesame seeds

2 tsp (10 mL) turmeric

1 tsp (5 mL) onion salt

1 tsp (5 mL) celery salt

1 tsp (5 mL) cumin

1 tsp (5 mL) ground coriander

Cayenne pepper to taste

Olive oil

Cubed bread for dipping

1  Using a mortar and pestle or a small food processor, crush the almonds into small pieces. Add the remaining ingredients except the olive oil and bread and mix well. Transfer to a small bowl. Pour the olive oil into another bowl. Serve with bread cubes that diners dip first in the oil and then into the dukka. 

Serves 6 to 8

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Donna Hay has solutions for the "No Time to Cook" dilemma.

On a recent afternoon style-maker Donna Hay took a few minutes to talk about her new book  no time to cook, fresh & easy recipes for a fast forward world, (HarperCollinsCanada, $36.95). She was in Toronto from Australia on a whirlwind trip to promote the book, and help celebrate the opening of  the very hip  and happening Teatro Verde's flagship store in the very hip and historic Yorkville.

Say "Donna Hay" and immediately there's a vision of uncluttered, light and  fresh food photography and clean-to-the-bone recipes with inviting flavour twists. Her cookbooks and magazine have a style as distinctive as any in the culinary world. I just can't get the word "clean" or "white" out of my head when I think of Donna Hay food photography. 

So what inspired this star of the culinary world to focus in on quick meals? I'm afraid, the answer is no surprise. She now has two young boys, 3 and 6, and understands, like every other parent the need to feed her family well in spite of arriving home from work dead tired. The solutions she has found for this challenge define the chapters, and inspire the recipes. 

Her first solution is assembled dinners. Better than take-out, still with the cook's own touch but without all the chopping and prep that seems like an unscalable mountain when you get home with a bare 20 minutes to get supper on the table. Store-bought hummus is a favourite "cheat" ingredient, already marinated vegetables, couscous, deli roast beef and canned lentils and beans also figure in these recipes. And she's not embarassed to suggest sandwiches for supper!

Nor is Donna Hay afraid to pick up a barbecued chicken on the way home from work. "It can make so many things", she added. And they don't have to be boring "things" as the cheat's chicken caesar salad and the chicken salad with coconut dressing attest. She's up to to maxxing the flavour of a dish with condiments - Thai, Indian, mustard, pickled ginger, onion jam  - giving appealing flavour twists to simple ingredients like steak and chicken, grilled or broiled  in the simplest way. 

So what's in Donna Hay's fridge at home. "More than most people", she conceded," a couple of cheeses, feta, parmesan and a good Cheddar. Lots of vegetables - broccoli, green beans and snow peas. And eggs - my boys love to bake." The Hay pantry includes the usual pasta, many of them Asian, jasmine and arborio rice, preserved lemon and tuna. Open the door to the freezer and there's frozen berries for the boys' muffin-making sessions, pizza dough, frozen peas and a whole selection of dishes like broccoli & bacon soup Hay makes to have "some now, some later". Donna Hay admits that she thought freezing meals was old-fashioned "best left to my mother's generation", but now relishes the night-off meals she's packed away. 

If you're like Donna Hay, get home, make dinner and sit together to enjoy the fellowship of family, the absolutely last thing you want to do is "the dishes". Solution? One pot meals, and thought-through recipes that pare out the excess bowls, skillets and utensils that fill the sink and plunge a cook into despair. From this section comes a vividly flavoured chicken dish made from very familiar ingredients. Donna Hay recommends this kind of one-pot dish to a fledgling cook who needs a few really tasty easy recipes on which to build a repertoire of quick suppers. 

Lemon-Feta Chicken 

When Donna Hay creates a new recipe, she works out core flavours that work hard together, like lemon and oregano, and never forgets textures so a recipe like this has mellow and crunchy. She likes to serve the chicken and pan juices on a bed of baby spinach leaves - the heat of the chicken wilts the spinach, and voila- an easy vegetable course at the same time. Double the ingredients for more servings.

2 chicken breasts, each about 200 g, trimmed

200 g feta, thickly sliced

5 sprigs fresh oregano

1 tbsp lemon zest

2 tbsp lemon juice

olive oil, for sprinkling

cracked black pepper

green salad, optional 

. Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). 

. Place chicken, feta, oregano, lemon zest and juice in a baking dish. Sprinkle with olive oil and pepper. Bake for 18 minutes, or until chicken is cooked through (juice run clear when pierced with a knife).

. Serve with a simple green salad, or as Donna Hay suggested at our interview, on a bed of baby spinach. 

. Serves 2.

White on white background is often what Donna Hay picks for the food she styles, either for her cookbooks, or for her magazine. The food "pops" in an appetizing and interesting way.

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