Now here's a beef short ribs recipe you can serve to company—even on a holiday.

This silky tomato sauce with a touch of cream makes mild-flavored cod sing. Serve with: Farro or rice and a salad of mixed greens.

This creamy mushroom risotto recipe uses a mix of fresh mushrooms—any combination of cremini, shiitake, button or oyster would work well. Vermouth adds a little sweetness and acidity to the dish to balance the earthiness of the mushrooms.

Don't be afraid to put octopus in the slow cooker! Expand your palate and enjoy this tender, light meat that tastes similar to chicken. This red wine sauce is very rich, briny and deeply flavored, so much so that you only need to serve half of it with the octopus.

Duck breasts may seem too fancy for the average weeknight, but they roast up beautifully and quickly. This preparation, with its luscious ruby-colored sauce, is definitely one that will impress.

In this healthy salmon dinner, you'll get a dose of greens and green dressing! Chowing down on 6 or more servings of dark leafy greens a week can help keep your brain in top shape. This dish features the Test Kitchen's current go-to method for doctoring a can of chickpeas: spice them up and roast until crispy.

Get into the fall spirit with this one-pan gnocchi with a creamy pumpkin sauce. Some pumpkin and other squash sauces can be cloyingly sweet, but not this one--it's savory all the way, thanks to the bacon, garlic and thyme. Instead of being boiled, a package of store-bought gnocchi--one of our favorite convenience products--is browned and crisped in a little bit of bacon fat. Then the sauce (made with canned pumpkin--another great convenience product) is prepared right in that same pan, so cleanup is minimal too. Serve with a simple green salad for an easy dinner that comes together in 30 minutes.

In this healthy black cod recipe, cooking the fillets skin-side down makes it easy to keep them intact when you flip them. Be sure to pat the fish dry before cooking—it's the key to getting the skin crispy. The black cod is served alongside roasted broccoli and potatoes for a satisfying, 30-minute dinner.

Shrimp scampi is a favorite dish at many Italian restaurants, but our version takes just 20 minutes to prepare, so it's perfect for a weeknight dinner. It's served over linguine with a buttery wine sauce.

Coating fish with nuts and baking it is an easy, foolproof way to cook it elegantly. And it is especially nice with a mild white fish like cod or halibut. The spinach turns a little yellowy because it's cooked with the acidic lemon juice, but what you lose in green color is more than made up for in great flavor.

Created by chef Fabio Viviani of Siena Tavern in Chicago, this Amatriciana sauce is a classic of modern Roman cooking (though it most likely came from the town of Amatrice about 90 miles away). Typically, it's made with few ingredients: garlic, guanciale (cured pork jowl), cheese and tomato. This version doctors up jarred sauce to keep it quick and calls for easy-to-find pancetta in place of the guanciale. This tomato sauce is sometimes paired with bucatini; here, Fabio dresses up rigatoni with it.

This recipe for seared scallops with white beans and spinach turns out a healthy dinner that looks impressive (and tastes great) in just 25 minutes. Giving lemons a quick sizzle in the skillet amps up the flavor of this piccata-inspired dish. The heat helps release even more citrus juice and sweetens it too. When shopping for scallops, look for ones labeled "dry"—some scallops are soaked in a solution that prevents them from searing properly and can give them a soapy flavor.