GREAT HOME COOKS : Meet Miss Lee Kum Kee of 1989

Francesca Smithwick-Driver is bopping around her boxy Manhattan Beach home, opening the oven, peering into the refrigerator, pouring wine, poking at some frying carrots and talking about her favorite subject.

“I take cooking classes,” she says. “And I like cookbooks. They’re my favorite reading. I have so many cookbooks. If I cooked every recipe, we’d never live long enough to eat them all, I swear.

“If it takes more than an hour to do, though, I’m not interested. I have a job.”

By day she is the bookkeeper at a construction company that she owns with her husband of seven years, Curtis Driver. Her husband, who nominated her as a great home chef, wrote that she always ends up in the cookbook section at a bookstore and that every week she makes two meals they’ve never had before.

He also mentioned enthusiasm, which seems to be her basic approach to things. During the meal she discovers that the Times photographer has a number of food allergies. By the end of the meal she is sketching out, in considerable detail, an allergen-free cookbook--although she has no allergies herself.

Her own cooking is eclectic: dishes she picked up from friends, ethnic dishes from books, experiments of her own. One of the best is her shrimp pasta, which combines Chinese oyster sauce with shrimp, cream and fried onions. If made with a good-quality oyster sauce, it has an intriguing perfume--like old Madeira wine. All her dishes are vivid and savory and, as she says, quick to make.

She didn’t get this interest in cooking from her family. “My mother hated to cook,” she says. “My grandmother too--or no, she didn’t hate to cook, it’s just that you cook a certain number of meals in your life, and Grandmother had already made her quota.

“My mother is Spanish, my father is a very English lawyer. They’re so different, how they ever got together I’ll never know--they were married for about five minutes.” In the 1960s, she remembers her mother wearing flamboyant falls and miniskirts and showing up at her daughter’s Catholic school wearing a leopard-print dress and a fur stole.

“When I was growing up, I only liked about five things: fried chicken, spaghetti, pancakes and one or two others. When you’re a kid--those are the days when you can live on bologna sandwiches. I wasn’t interested in food.”

The first things she remembers cooking were quesadillas and pasta Alfredo, which she and a girlfriend made when they were in their teens. She licks her lips at the memory of Alfredo sauces gone by.

“But I didn’t really start to cook until I was 25,” she says. That was when she spent three months visiting a friend who had moved to New Zealand.

“Francie was a gourmet cook,” she says. “She had Gourmet magazine going back years. And it was very rural where they lived. You put out a net in the evening and in the morning there would be a 10-pound snapper in it. When you wanted to make an apple pie, you just went out and picked some apples. They had pears, lettuces, corn.

“You just cooked all the time because it was miles from anywhere else and that was all there was to do. She gave me the confidence to cook.”

A more recent food adventure involved Lee Kum Kee, the Hong Kong-based manufacturer of Chinese sauces. “I was the Lee Kum Kee Girl in 1989,” she says with a hint of amusement. “The company was doing a major promotion in this country, they were expecting to be on every supermarket shelf, so they were looking for an American who knew nothing about Chinese food so they could teach them on cable TV. I was hired because of my ignorance.

“There’s a photo of me holding a pig while they pour sauce on it. It was on the cover of Grocer’s Journal and appeared in about 300 food trade publications. I really got a bang out of it. And I learned about Chinese food.

“Cooking is my relaxation,” she says. “I have it easy--I just cook for the two of us, and there’s a good market two blocks away. And I have an appreciative husband. I don’t trust people who don’t like to eat.

“Every year I have a project. Last year it was breads, and I’ve done pastas and so on.

“But I’m not great at accessorizing food, I just sort of throw it on the plate. Maybe next year I’ll make Martha Stewart my project.”

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“I don’t know whether this is an English salad,” says Smithwick-Driver. “I just heard them called English peas.” When making this with fresh peas, make sure your pods contain fairly large peas or you’ll do a lot of hulling for nothing.

ENGLISH PEA SALAD

2 cups shelled fresh peas, blanched and chilled, about 1 1/2 pounds in shell

1/2 cup shredded firm white cheese, such as Jack or feta

3 tablespoons red onion, finely chopped

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon lemon juice

5 tablespoons mayonnaise

Pepper

4 to 6 lettuce leaves

Combine peas, cheese and onion. Mix olive oil, lemon juice, mayonnaise and pepper to taste and then toss salad. Serve on lettuce. Makes 4 servings.

Each serving contains about:

379 calories; 185 mg sodium; 21 mg cholesterol; 26 grams fat; 26 grams carbohydrates; 13 grams protein; 3.83 grams fiber.

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“I love this dish,” says Smithwick-Driver emphatically. “Everybody figures I had to have worked for hours on it.”

SHRIMP PASTA

2 tablespoons oil

1 large onion, thinly sliced

3/4 cup whipping cream

1/4 cup oyster sauce

1 pound large raw shrimp, shelled and deveined

1/2 pound rotini or farfalle (bow tie) pasta

Heat oil in skillet over medium heat. Add and saute onion until tender, 4 to 5 minutes. Add whipping cream and oyster sauce and cook over medium heat until slightly reduced, 3 to 4 minutes. Add shrimp and cook until pink, 1 to 2 minutes.

Bring 2 quarts water to boil. Add pasta and cook al dente, about 8 to 10 minutes.

Drain pasta well and place in serving bowl. Stir in shrimp and sauce and serve. Makes 4 servings.

Each serving contains about:

580 calories; 1,721 mg sodium; 234 mg cholesterol; 26 grams fat; 53 grams carbohydrates; 32 grams protein; 0.43 gram fiber.

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SWORDFISH WITH AVOCADO SALSA

1 large avocado, peeled and diced

Olive oil

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1/3 cup chopped green onions

2 to 3 tablespoons chopped cilantro

1 clove garlic, minced

2 to 3 dashes hot pepper sauce

Salt

1 1/2 pounds swordfish steaks

Combine avocado, 1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil, lemon juice, green onions, cilantro, garlic, hot pepper sauce and season to taste with salt.

Brush swordfish steaks with olive oil and grill or barbecue until fish is opaque, about 7 to 10 minutes per inch of thickness. Spoon salsa over steaks and serve. Makes 3 servings.

Each serving contains about:

395 calories; 272 mg sodium; 71 mg cholesterol; 24 grams fat; 7 grams carbohydrates; 38 grams protein; 1.54 grams fiber.

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“This was the first cake I ever learned to make,” says Driver. It was an appropriate dish for a beginner, quick and easy, a fragrant almond cake with a rich mocha frosting.

ALMOND TORTE WITH MOCHA WHIPPED CREAM

2 tablespoons flour

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

4 eggs

3/4 cup sugar

1 cup sliced blanched almonds

Mocha Whipping Cream

Mix flour and baking powder. Combine eggs and sugar in blender or food processor and process until smooth. Add nuts and process until finely grated. Add flour mixture and process until mixed.

Pour into 2 (8-inch) cake pans, greased and lined with parchment or wax paper. Bake at 350 degrees 20 minutes. Turn layers onto wire racks and cool completely. Fill and frost with Mocha Whipping Cream. (Cake will only stand to 3 inches high.) Makes 8 servings.

Each serving contains about:

434 calories; 257 mg sodium; 168 mg cholesterol; 29 grams fat; 39 grams carbohydrates; 9 grams protein; 0.57 gram fiber.

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Mocha Whipping Cream

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

2 teaspoons vanilla

1 tablespoon instant coffee powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 cups whipping cream

Mix sugar, cocoa, vanilla, instant coffee, salt and whipping cream in mixer bowl and whip until thick.

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NECTARINE CHEESECAKE BARS

1/2 cup flour

1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup unsalted butter, cold

1 egg

Cheese Topping

1 large or 2 medium nectarines

Mix together flour, 1/2 cup sugar, baking powder and salt. Cut in butter until mealy. Add egg and mix well.

With spatula, spread mixture over bottom of lightly buttered 13x9-inch baking pan. Spread Cheese Topping over mixture. Thinly slice nectarine and arrange in layer on top of cheese. Sprinkle surface with 1 tablespoon sugar.

Bake at 350 degrees until golden, about 18 minutes. Sprinkle with remaining 1 tablespoon sugar and let cool. Cut into 3x1-inch bars. Makes 16 servings.

Each serving contains about:

139 calories; 118 mg sodium; 50 mg cholesterol; 8 grams fat; 14 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams protein; 0.05 gram fiber.

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Cheese Topping

8 ounces cream cheese, softened

2 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 large egg

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1 tablespoon flour

1/8 teaspoon salt

Beat cream cheese, sugar and vanilla with mixer until well blended. Add egg, lemon juice, flour and salt and beat until smooth.