SO THE CLOCK is running down on another holiday shopping season, and you find you need a gift for the kitchen-involved person on your list. A good cookbook might do the trick, but while today's market is saturated with cookbooks, surprisingly few of them are any good. Too many cookbooks these days are celebrity vehicles that too strongly resemble pornography (with imagery meant to arouse rather than elucidate) to hold one's interest or have any enduring value.

A worthy exception is Mustards Grill Napa Valley Cookbook, by Cindy Pawlcyn (Ten Speed Press, $39.95). Oh, it's big, and visually stunning, with plenty of photos of the author and her long-running restaurant, along with sumptuous shots of wine-country produce and scenery. So it probably qualifies as food porn. But it would be riveting even without the pretty pictures. Pawlcyn is a great chef and an attractive personality; she is direct and authoritative without being pompous, and her text is studded from beginning to end with little jewels of wisdom that will actually be of use to people who cook at home.

Her recipe for "golden gazpacho," for instance, includes lemongrass, which, "after six or seven attempts, we finally got ... to grow in our garden"; the resulting pottage, "a kind of Spanish-Vietnamese summer soup – is one of those crosscultural combos that California's great growing conditions allow us local chefs to make." And then pass on to everybody else.

There is, naturally, a great deal of information and tips about grilling (drain your marinades thoroughly before putting marinated items on the grill!) and recipes that draw effortlessly on a wealth of global influences, from achiote-marinated chicken breasts with black beans and mango salsa to double lamb chops with tapenade and polenta to Mongolian pork chops.

If there is a theme to Pawlcyn's style of cooking, it is big flavor. She is not shy about spicing things up – or at all dogmatic about tinkering with the recipes, obeisance to which she describes as "a pain in the ass" but necessary, at least in a restaurant kitchen, "to keep things somewhat consistent."

But consistency, as Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested in another context, is the hobgoblin of small minds – or home chefs – so it's just fine with Pawlcyn if you mess with things.

"Feel free to make substitutions as you see fit, though, for personal taste or to eliminate a trip to the store," she says at the outset of the book. "Think of these recipes as a collection of kitchen maps to get you headed in the right direction." Toward big-flavor country.

Paul Reidinger paulr@sfbg.com

The Blender

1. Mission Villa's enchiladas "Aguascalientes," with mole

2. Butter-roasted salmon filets

3. Finlandia Lite Muenster

4. The wine merchant at Le Zinc