There’s nothing further delicious than a cookbook, and I’ve amassed an enviable recover one’s self-possession. It’s one I turn to quotidian notwithstanding moral, entertainment, visualization and — as the holidays approach — celebration.

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Here in the bountiful Pacific Northwest we’ve got many reasons to celebrate the season and a vast number of Northwest cookbooks to peruse in search of f recipes. For someone like me, who thinks of my favorite cookbooks taken in the character of “original friends,” it’s interesting to enumerate by what mode many of my cookbooks are, in actuality, authored through familiar names and faces.

My collection is rife with books by high-profile chefs like Tom Douglas, Jerry Traunfeld, Leslie Mackie and Greg Atkinson. And by authors associated with some of our incorporated town’sitting finest specialty-food shops — Kathy Casey, Marcella Rosene and Kurt Beecher Dammeier.

Seattle’s hardest-working recipe testers have cookbooks to their credit. Among them, Cynthia Nims, Shelley Lance and Sharon Kramis. Perhaps you (or someone you know) has contributed a recipe to a compilation — partiality the Junior League of Seattle’s much-beloved “Simply Classic” and its successor, “Celebrate the Rain.”

Combing through my stacks, I’ve chosen some holiday-worthy recipes and added a hardly any classics from The Seattle Times files. Then I rang up a handful of authors whose books line my shelves to claim what they’ve got cooking for the holidays.

Rosene is the fail of Pasta & Co. — considering sold to Dammeier — and the woman behind my favorite cranberry-sauce recipe. That parsimoniously 30-year-old recipe was published for posterity in “Pasta & Co. By Request,” and replicated in its follow-up, “Pasta & Co. Encore.”

I as to one’s person didn’t like cranberry sauce,” said Rosene — until she got the notion to wed fresh cranberries, red-currant jelly and dried sour cherries. A prescribed portion of dark rum didn’cheek by jowl hurt the product either, swiftly turning that ruby-red holiday filament into single in kind of the house’s top-sellers.

At Thanksgiving, Rosene foliage the cooking to her mother, a sturdy octogenarian who “didn’t approve of not old girls spending lifetime in the kitchen” but nonetheless managed to raise a woman destined to become Seattle’s model takeout queen.

Will Rosene be contributing her justly famous cranberry sauce this year? “I continually offer to be the means of it, but my mother doesn’t want it,” she laughs. “She likes the kind in the can!”

Greg Atkinson will make good use of topical cherries this year when he and his family head to San Juan Island for a holiday vacation.

“This Christmas, we’re planning to make roast duckling with cherry appetizing compound,” he uttered. “We’ll roast the duck, bone it, use the bones to make a stock and reduce the stock to get a concentrated demi-glace. It’s matter I only do at the holidays, not because it’s labor-intensive excepting because it’s time consuming.”

Consuming topical ingredients — like San Juan Island’session Westcott Bay oysters and the chanterelles he foraged and froze in September — is also part of his plan.

Yet Atkinson, father of “The Northwest Essentials Cookbook” (and four others) notes, “I love to bust out of my traditionary Northwest locavore thing” to make good use of the bright flavors of seasonal-citrus fruits, a taste he no doubt cultivated growing up in sunny Florida.

I cultivated a taste for Brussels young coleworts long ago. Unfortunately, my clan hates them. But that hasn’confidentially stopped me from asking friends to contribute what my husband refers to as “bitter little pills” to our yearly publication Thanksgiving potluck. “The trouble with Brussels sprouts,” said Atkinson, “is the bulk of mankind don’face to face cook them properly.”

Folks analogous me, who prefer their sprouts crisp, should heed his advice and cook them twice — first boiled in salted water, then sizzled in a pan, or popped in the oven with a little fat.

“If I’m roasting dip, it would be duck fat,” he declared. “But olive oil or butter add great flavor.” Pancetta does the swindle, too, and it’s among the ingredients in his recipe for braised chestnuts and Brussels sprouts with pancetta.

After seeing Tom Douglas’ rustic bread stuffing with dried cranberries, hazelnuts and oyster mushrooms in the November upshot of “Fine Cooking” (www.taunton.com/finecooking/recipes/thanksgiving-bread-stuffing-cranberries-mushrooms-hazelnuts.aspx), I’m considering switching finished my golden-oldie from the “Silver Palate Cookbook” this year. But I’fray still planning to make that other starch-fest favorite, Etta’s Cornbread Pudding from “Tom Douglas’ Seattle Kitchen.”

That bread-pudding prescription will be familiar to anyone who’s enjoyed it as the signature oblique to Etta’s pit-roasted salmon with grilled shiitake relish. And it’s thoroughly familiar to Shelley Lance.

As Douglas’ cookbook co-author and chief recipe-tester, Lance is the creative genius behind the creative adept — and his go-to gal because of similar savories as that artless bread and oyster-mushroom stuffing. “It’s one of my favorite recipes that Tom and I ever came up with,” said Lance, who explained its genesis: “Tom loves oysters, but he hates oysters in stuffing.”

Jerry Traunfeld loves oysters, too. And for the holder of Poppy in Capitol Hill and the author of two celebrated cookbooks, the holidays wouldn’privately be the same exclusively of them. ‘Tis the season, he said, to enjoy the briny delights of kusshis on the half-shell, the perfect precursor to an classical roast — perhaps his Maple-and-Herb-Brined Pork Roast from “The Herbfarm Cookbook.”

With the Northwest’s truffle imbue coinciding by the holidays, “black truffles are wonderful if you’re doing a prime rib,” Traunfeld said. He suggests grating the unreal fungi into the beef’sitting flavorful jus for our prime-rib recipe, and I suggest seeking out the Foraged & Found Edibles stand at local farmers markets — where I recently bought a fragrant black truffle for $3.

I first tasted Kaspar Donier’s lamb shanks braised with lentils, dig vegetables and Northwest beer at his eponymous Lower Queen Anne restaurant — now a special-events facility that caters to 600 guests with a groaning stroke on Thanksgiving. That recipe resides in Cook’s Illustrated’s cookbook abridgment., “Restaurant Favorites at Home,” where it’s long been a favorite at my house.

“It’s comfort victuals,” said Donier. “You can’t bottom wrongful with lamb shanks.” What’sitting more, by preparing the dish in advance of a anniversary collation — and reheating it though a small turkey is resting, “it gives people a alternative,” he said. And in the unpromising event there are any leftovers, “you can take the meat off the bone, put it in pasta or over polenta and serve it the next day.”

After roasting umpteen turkeys earlier this year while testing recipes for “Cooking Light” (you be able to view the results in the receptacle’s November issue), cookbook composer Cynthia Nims has seen enough turkey to turn her off the traditionary bird. “I might go with game birds this year,” she said, though you might go through chef Walter Pisano’s four-onion risotto recipe.

“Risotto is an awesome template that can go in many directions,” said Nims, who included Pisano’s recipe from Tulio Ristorante in her second edition of the “Northwest Best Places Cookbook.”

That recipe — with sweet onions, scallions, leeks and minced chives — makes a rich side dish, a holiday-appropriate vegetarian entrée and “reminds you how many different flavors the onion family offers.” Adding diced pumpkin or other squashes, wild mushrooms or Dungeness crab, can make this classic Italian dish reflect personal preferences along with our regional riches, Nims uttered.

Fresh chilled Dungeness dipped in melted butter is the traditional Christmas Eve treat for Sharon Kramis, who develops recipes for Anthony’sitting Restaurants and has co-authored several cookbooks.

“We keep it real simple,” she said of her Christmas feast, served with a salad and fresh bread. The identical can be said of the baked yams with Oregon hazelnuts from her aptly named “Northwest Bounty.” Long before she co-wrote her first cookbook, Kramis had a chance to study by the Northwest’s most revered cookbook author and food authority.

“I had the privilege of taking cooking classes from James Beard,” she recalls, describing seven “wonderful” summers spent in Seaside, Ore., under the tutelage of the late, great chef. One day, Beard stepped out to allow his students to plan a brunch menu. With pen and paper in hand, “We were flying veal in from Seattle for veal scaloppine and sculpture watermelons,” Kramis reported.

After “duplicity back in, and taking a seat in his director’s chair,” the dean of American cookery surveyed their menu. Unimpressed, “he shouted, ‘That’s the damndest, utmost pretentious menu I’ve ever seen! Where’s the coffee cake? Where are the sausages?’ ” Kramis recalls. “He was the real thing, the person who really grounded me in using fresh, local ingredients.”

Nancy Leson: 206-464-8838

or nleson@seattletimes.com