And on Sundays, she cooks some more

As she sears short ribs, three at a time, in a smoking-hot skillet, Suzanne Goin admits that she doesn't exactly practice what she preaches.

It's not that she makes this dish much differently in my kitchen than she and her fellow cooks probably do at her acclaimed Mediterranean restaurant in Los Angeles, or any differently than she instructs in her new cookbook, ''Sunday Suppers at Lucques." She seasons the meat with near-handfuls of salt, slips the skins off just-boiled potatoes and just-roasted onions as if her hands were asbestos, and later assembles the components to look the way she was taught to make them look at Al Forno restaurant two decades ago: like they were ''born on the plate."

But while her cookbook is a paean to the joys of cooking weekend meals for friends and family, the chef has rarely had a Sunday off in seven years. ''It's funny," she says. ''I make those special Sundays happen for other people." Goin (her name rhymes with ''flowin' ") is usually at Lucques.

Ever since opening the restaurant in 1998, Goin and company have departed from the regular menu on Sundays, offering up an informal chef's-choice approach for a fixed price. The concept didn't catch on at first, but then became one of the busiest nights of the week. ''It went from, 'Why can't I have more choices?' to 'Oh, it's good to not have choices? Oh, OK,' " she says.

The idea came from Goin's attempt to re-create the feel of the relaxed family dinners she remembered from her childhood, when she played prep cook for her late father's rustic Italian suppers, which the family would end up eating late in the afternoon. ''There's just something that feels different about Sunday," says Goin, who was in Boston for a special book-tour dinner at Radius. ''It has that lazy day thing about it. There's also something a little bit sad about Sundays, you know? It's that part about the workweek starting."

When she decided to write a cookbook, she focused on those Sunday meals. The three-course menus have a comforting appeal that she figured could translate to a home kitchen.

In an era where the best-selling cookbooks seem to offer 30-minute meals or cake-mix doctoring, ''Sunday Suppers at Lucques" might seem a tough sell. Although the recipes aren't fussy, many are still somewhat involved, with multiple components. While the short ribs braise in a heady mix of balsamic vinegar, port, and red wine, for instance, Goin boils two kinds of potatoes for a classic puree that requires a ricer, drying the potatoes in a saucepan, then slowly stirring in butter and a mixture of hot cream and milk.

She roasts pearl onions in their skins -- a technique that intensifies their flavor in a way that boiling never could -- then sautes them with Swiss chard. Before she puts it all together, the meltingly tender short ribs are crisped in a hot oven, and she whisks horseradish into creme fraiche for a pungent topping.

All of this seems to violate the idea of Sundays as a day of rest, as Publishers Weekly wrote in a review. But Goin and coauthor Teri Gelber are not out to limit kitchen time, Rachael Ray-style, or to advocate stockpiling a week's worth of meals.

''It's not for people who are like, 'Oh, I've got to get dinner on the table,' although there's a lot of stuff in there that's easy and doesn't take that much time," she says with rapid-fire delivery. ''But I'm assuming the audience is more people like me who enjoy the process and want to make something, and hopefully the results are good enough that you're like, 'OK, I'm glad I took that extra 15 minutes or 20 minutes.' "

Goin, 39, has reveled in the process of cooking since childhood, when she would crack open a cookbook to stave off weekend boredom. Her parents, both doctors, took her and sister Jessica on trips through the United States and Europe that featured stops at Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris, and her father even gave her a Joel Robuchon cookbook along with a fine-mesh strainer in the hopes that she would tackle Robuchon's silky potato puree (she has).

She worked at Ma Maison in Los Angeles her senior year of high school and then at Al Forno in Providence while she was going to Brown University. Jobs with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and Todd English at Boston's Olives followed, with a stint in France in between. But it wasn't until she took over the kitchen at the tiny Alloro in Boston's North End that she got to put her own stamp on a restaurant menu.

''It was like having people over," Goin says as she pours wine and seasonings over chopped root vegetables for the short ribs. ''I'd go in, I'd prep all day, people would come in, I'd make the food, then do my ordering for the next day. It was a great first chef's job."

She got noticed, drawing raves for her soothing yet inventive cuisine steeped in the produce of local farmers, her dishes more often French than Italian (even though the owner required that all the dishes have Italian names). When the reviews started rolling in, the 28-seat place went from 20 covers a night to 100. When her father became ill, she moved back to Los Angeles, working at Campanile before opening Lucques (pronounced Luke), which has become one of the city's most highly praised restaurants.

Boston chef Marc Orfaly, who met her when both cooked at Olives and who dated her in the 1990s, isn't surprised by Goin's success with Lucques and her newer wine bar, A.O.C., nor with the cookbook, for which publisher Knopf has already ordered a second printing.

''Even with simple food she manages interesting pairings," says Orfaly, who owns Pigalle in the Theatre District and Marco Cucina Romano in the North End. ''Even though the food stands on its own, there are layers of complexity."

Orfaly sees a Jamie Oliver-style appeal in Goin, a three-time James Beard Award nominee who in 1999 was named one of Food & Wine's best new chefs in the nation. ''Here's a serious cookbook -- as serious as any other cheffy cookbook out there -- but it also has a great sensibility to it, and it's fun and not overbearing," he says. ''That's Suzanne. She's not pretentious, she's not heady, she's very down to earth."

Johanne Killeen, co-owner with George Germon of Al Forno, remembers well when Goin worked there while a student at Brown, first as a waitress and then in the kitchen. ''The first thing you notice is that she's absolutely gorgeous," Killeen said on the phone from Provence. ''And she's got a personality and a heart that go with that. . . . It's reflected in everything she does."

Goin, who is married to fellow chef David Lentz of the Hungry Cat, organized ''Sunday Suppers" by season, with almost 130 recipes divided into 32 three-course menus designed to serve six. Just like at Lucques, there are two entree choices on each menu, one meat and one seafood. The braised short ribs with potato puree, Swiss chard, and horseradish cream, for instance, is a main course in a winter menu that starts with an onion and cantal cheese tart and ends with warm crepes and hazelnut brown butter.

The chef doesn't expect readers to follow menu ideas slavishly. After she persuaded me to invite friends over to eat the short ribs she had made, she approved of my attraction to her chocolate stout cake and Guinness ice cream, offered as part of the book's St. Patrick's Day menu, as a fitting dessert. She suggested I start with a pomegranate and persimmon salad, but persimmons were nowhere to be found, so I served her delectably simple blood orange, date, Parmesan, and almond salad to start instead.

That's just as Goin would have it. As a California chef, she knows she has access to year-round produce that New Englanders don't. ''If somebody lives in LA, they can get everything in the book really easily," she says. ''But if you can't get great Kabocha squash, if you have great Blue Hubbard, use that. I don't want to be so strict."

Besides, a strict interpretation of the book's title would have forced me to postpone my dinner party until the weekend, and Goin would frown on that.

''Whenever I sign the book," she says, ''I always write, 'Don't wait for Sundays.' "

Joe Yonan can be reached at yonan@globe.com.