- An easy dessert is an apricot sherbet.

Take a can of apricot in heavy syrup, put it in the blender, puree, place it into a gratin dish like that in your freezer and you can get it when it's still slightly mushy.

I like it this way.

A great dessert for the summer.

A couple of cookie, a bit of crushed pistachio on top.

Great dessert.

I'm Jacques Pepin, and this is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

I'm starting my menu today with a tomato soup and a spinach coulis.

See, those tomato are really ripe, and that's what I want for that soup.

The first thing that I want to do, however, is to put spinach in a bowl like this.

And those are very baby, small baby leaf spinach, so I don't really have to clean them up.

If those were very long with a big stem like that, you fold the leaf this way and pull out that stem, which would be tough in a big one, but not in this one, which are very tender.

So what I want to do is to cook this in the microwave oven.

I might as well cover it.

(oven beeps) It should be ready.

Quite hot too.

Here we are.

You can see it's all wilted.

And this, you know, I can put that in a small food processor like this.

This is hot.

And put it directly to emulsify in there.

You know, to do a puree now.

You may say, why don't you do it raw directly and roll it fine?

But first it's a bit mellower and finer when it's cooked this way.

In addition to that, it doesn't change color.

If it's fruit it will change color.

So I put a dash of salt in there.

I'm gonna do a little bit of water, a dash of water in there.

And a bit of oil too.

And that should emulsify together nicely.

Okay.

Let's see with that little machine.

(machine whirs) You have a beautiful green sauce here.

You can use that.

You know, I mix it with more oil sometime, and I use it as an oil of spinach.

See how beautiful it is.

Deep green.

Good.

So this is part of my soup, which I'm going to leave here.

And then I'm going to work on the tomato.

And I'm going to cut them into pieces and put them directly into the food processor or the blender rather, for that.

Okay.

So I have about three pound of tomato here that I'm going to put together.

And of course the best is the ripe tomato.

So here we are.

That should emulsify nicely in there.

Give me some more space.

(blender whirs) Okay, I got more space.

Now in there I need some onion.

I think that should be more than enough for that.

Okay.

Garlic.

Maybe two, three clove of garlic.

Always cut the end of the stem on your garlic this way.

'Cause the end of the stem, that's where the skin is attached to it.

And if you do this, when you crack the garlic a little bit, like I do here, well, the skin is gonna fall off.

It won't fall off if you don't take the end of it.

That's what I insist telling the student at the school.

But they really don't do it (chuckles).

It's okay.

(Jacques bangs palm) Crush it a little bit.

Okay, what else do I have in there?

I have some jalapeno paper here.

Those are jalapeno.

You could have serrano, you could have habanero.

Or you could have none at all and just put a bit of hot sauce, you know?

Now I'm cutting it around here.

Usually, you know, at least 70%, they say, of the hotness is in the seed.

But I always taste a piece of that.

(exhales) That's pretty hot.

So maybe that piece will be enough.

Whew.

I can taste it.

You know, it's funny, because another time you do one, you taste it, taste like a green paper, it has no taste.

So taste it.

Always taste.

Okay.

I should have a glass of white wine now.

White wine is good for everything.

Red wine too actually.

So I'm going to put some salt.

And let's see how we can emulsify it.

(blender whirs) This is it.

Now, I could serve this, this way.

It has a beautiful color, it almost looks like strawberry sherbet, you know?

But I like to put it in the food meal.

Okay.

That's it.

And I can show you the bottom.

Here you can see the bottom, there is a lot of the seed and the skin.

Let me taste it here.

It's nice and thick.

Really fresh tomato, vibrant.

I think it's too thick.

So a bit of a chateau sink.

Or chateau faucet.

One of the two works perfectly fine to dilute your soup.

And what I need in there is a little bit of olive oil.

Which if you want to do it low calorie, that'd be perfectly fine.

You can leave it at this, but there.

The olive oil, you could actually leave it on top.

And with the tomato it should emulsify nicely just stirring it this way.

You can actually do it with a whisk also.

But that should work perfectly fine.

Nice and creamy.

Putting that on top.

Perfect sum of soup.

If I don't mess up the edge of that bowl, it's going to be a miracle.

Here it is.

Beautiful coulis on top here.

(tuneful piano music) That's it.

You serve that with a couple of toast crouton and it's a great first soup to start a menu, especially in summer.

Today is the day of the gratin.

And I'm going to do different type of gratin which we do often at the house.

And the first one is a gratin of mozzarella and bread.

It's very easy to do.

We do that often.

The bread is a bit dry.

And when people come up for a party sometime, Gloria want to do a few things, and we do that.

So you take a gratin dish like this, take a little bit of olive oil in there.

In the bottom.

Then put your toast right in there, press them in the bottom.

So that you fill up your tray, you can press them, and then turn them the other side so that they are slightly oiled on both side.

Nothing easier than that.

I put some garlic on top of it, which I have here.

Flake of garlic, you know, that you do with your vegetable peeler.

One on each side.

But first I wanna put some mozzarella on top.

And this is a soft mozzarella.

So you calculate to have one little piece of mozzarella per toast, you know, so here we are.

You don't have to be absolutely perfect in what you do.

Here I get more.

There's different type of mozzarella you know, the buffalo mozzarella can sometime be too mushy, you know, soft.

This is quite a soft mozzarella too.

And then some that you buy in the supermarket can be like a piece of rubber.

So choose the best one that you can get.

Here, cracked pepper on top.

And a little slice of garlic.

As I said, a slice of garlic done with the vegetable peeler is great because it's very, very thin.

This one, our large cloves, I did with elephant garlic.

It doesn't really matter what you use there.

You can cut down on your garlic, but I love garlic, so.

This, and I see that I need a bit of salt.

I just tested that cheese.

It's very, very mild there.

And I sprinkle a bit of oil on top.

That's it.

That's ready to go into the oven.

You never miss with that.

You know, you do that even for lunch, a big gratin like that with a salad, and it's great.

So I'll put it there.

And next we're going to do little gratin of shrimp.

You know, gratin in France means crust.

And even in slang we say le gratin, which mean the upper crust.

Like in English, you know, which means the high level of society say le gratin in French, which means the le gratin, the crust, you know?

So it's used the same way.

I have those large shrimp here.

You want to peel those.

And what I do at home, you know when you get to the end here, you are gonna press to soften the flesh inside and pull out this.

So like you see, you have even the little tail here comes out so you don't waste it.

Okay.

What you want to do is to mix butter I have about half a stick of butter here.

I put some pepper, some salt in there.

Some scallion.

And of course, parsley and garlic we're going to put in there because it's a little bit like when we do snail in France, snail butter, which is basically a mixture of parsley and garlic.

So all of that goes in there.

I have that garlic here.

Hit it on the side, that will separate your cloves.

And again, you know when you peel it up, take the stem out.

Stem out.

I would think that I will use three clove for that, should be enough.

The rest of it can go there.

Again, you know if I crack it, you will see that, that will release the skin.

Again, the same way, you know, you look at it, the skin is removed there and you say it's fine.

It's not fine because this one has a big black rotten part, so take it out.

Okay.

Then we crush it.

That release the essential oil, you know?

Here I want it fairly fine.

So here, all my garlic in there.

Okay, so I have garlic, I put the shrimp in there.

And we wanna stir this.

That's all seasoned with butter.

I think probably a little more salt in there.

Well, I think I'm gonna put some mushroom also in there.

The mushroom takes some of the juice of the clam, you know?

Of the shrimp, rather.

And mix it together.

It really give a very special taste when we do, especially with butter, like a bird escargot, you put bread or a thing like that with it.

You put mushroom because the mushroom released a lot of juice.

And that juice released by the mushroom make things milder, not as rich that it would be if you didn't put the mushroom in it.

That's more than enough here.

Okay.

And I think a little bit of olive oil.

Okay, you can serve those four, five, six per person, depending whether it's a first course or a main course.

Okay, let's see on this.

I think I must have like five or six per person.

So I'm going to arrange them.

I have those small gratin dish this here, which are one, two, three, four, five, six, two, four, six.

Six here.

You know what you can do also, you can take the whole thing there, put it in a large gratin dish and just put it into the oven.

But it's nice, individual gratin like this, when guests come.

So even if the neighbor eat faster than you do, it'll still leave your portion in your own place for the wife.

My wife hates to go to the Chinese restaurant with me because I eat three times as fast as she does.

Okay.

With this on top, I'm going to do some breadcrumb which is classic on top that.

And a little bit of white wine.

So I have bread here.

Regular bread.

And one slice of bread like this.

Two slice of bread, about three quarter of an inch.

It's a nice quality bread.

Actually I have plenty here.

Two slice.

And one slice of bread like this that I put in the food processor to do breadcrumb.

You'll be surprised at how much breadcrumbs you do with one slice of bread.

I have it here.

Now, that slice of bread, the same size that I have here, I cut it and dice like this, and they shrink a little bit, but they put them in the oven.

Now I have dry breadcrumb.

Here, I'm going to have fresh breadcrumb.

And you're going to see the difference between one and the other.

This is the dry one, I can crush it in there.

And the other one, I'm gonna do it right in the food processor here.

Up.

Once disappeared.

(machine whirs) One slice of bread like that will give me over a cup of fresh breadcrumb.

You can see I fill up a thing like that with breadcrumb.

Now the other one, I can do it in the food processor too, but very often I do crouton like that at home.

And sometime I season that with herb de Provence or Italian seasoning, a bit of olive oil.

I put that in the oven and then I use those croutons on top of salad.

And sometime I crush those crouton to do breadcrumb.

What I want show you is the difference the same amount of bread makes.

You're going to have not even a third of what I have here.

So when you bread a piece of fish or a piece of veal, you dip it in eggs and you put it, and the fish will absorb maybe that much on one side, and that much on the other side, then you saute it in a skillet.

If you do it with the dry bread, it can still absorb about that much on this side, that much on the other side.

Totally different, you have three times as much bread with the dry breadcrumb that you're going to have with the fresh one.

It's not that you cannot use it, you just have to be aware of it and use smaller quantity, you know?

So what I want to do there is to oil this a little bit.

And what you want to do, you do that technique when you do like a rack of lamb or a leg of lamb, you put a little bit of oil on top of the bread.

Sometime you also put fresh thyme or whatever, not enough so that it become gooey.

As you can see, it's still very fluffy, but then it form a nice crust.

Otherwise it will have a tendency to burn, you know?

So I have one slice of bread here, and as you can see, if I use my dry breadcrumb, I would need two or three times that amount of breadcrumb here.

Okay, here.

There we are.

And on top of this I'm gonna put a little bit of Vin Blanc, you know, a little bit of white wine.

If I were to have that done ahead, I would not put the wine now, just when I'm ready to go into the oven.

About a tablespoon, not even a tablespoon.

This will go on top of this.

And that goes into the oven.

About 400 degree.

And this also, so.

This is spring.

And in spring we do strawberry and we do rhubarb.

And the rhubarb and strawberry crumble here is very good.

To hollow your berry, take the center of it here and pull.

You don't want to take all the bottom part of it.

Those are beautiful berry.

And when you deal with dessert, basically, the quality of the dessert is going to be totally dependent on the quality of the fruit.

The amount of sugar in it is the same thing too.

Sometime you may need a lot of sugar, sometime much less, depending on berry ripe or not.

Okay.

I always keep one, at least for me.

Now my rhubarb.

Some people peel the rhubarb, you know?

I mean, you can see that the peel comes out very easy.

I don't see there is no point in peeling it.

What you wanna remove, however, is the leaves.

The leaf of the rhubarb are poisonous, so you don't want to use that.

But this is perfectly fine.

Cut it into like two inches pieces.

This is a nice, fat rhubarb.

I have one in my garden Claude gave me.

First it doesn't turn red, it's a green one.

And at the beginning I thought it wasn't getting ripe.

It was ripe, but it's green, it will never turn red.

It's a curve, he trolled me there, 'cause I like rhubarb when it's red.

I will put two tablespoon of flour here.

A quarter of a cup of sugar.

And mint leaf.

I'm putting mint leaf in it, a whole bunch of it.

Like 15, 20 leaves in there, and they melt, or cook, rather, in the middle of the crumble and give really a wonderful taste.

Then I want to mix this together.

And then we want to put it directly into the bowl, into the gratin dish, you know?

Okay, here we are.

Then now we do the dough.

And I have a piece of butter here.

And again, another two tablespoon of flour.

And a quarter of a cup of sugar, the same way.

You wanna start mixing this.

And stirring that with granola here.

And I have a granola, pecan granola, which is good.

Make a nice crusty top.

Just a easy desert to do for the summer, you know?

Here we are.

That's basically it.

You don't wanna do too much fuss with it.

We put that directly on top.

You know, coarsely like this, it's going to melt.

And that's it.

That's it, you wanna put it on a cookie sheet.

And that's ready to go into the oven.

This is another gratin.

My crumble of berries.

Here's another gratin.

So this is the day of the gratin here.

And we have, of course, that gratin of mozzarella.

You wanna finish it up with some black oil-cured olive.

Maybe a little bit of chive on top.

And it's a nice dish to have with a party.

Our other gratin, of course.

I'm dying to test my shrimp gratin here.

It's hot, but very garlicy and buttery.

Delicious.

And let's see, this is really hot now.

(tuneful piano music) You would want to serve it, well, warm maybe, not quite as hot as this.

But you can see that the thickness of it in the bottom, the viscosity is just about right.

The bit of flour that we have in there.

This is homemade food, with a little bit of sour cream here.

And this is it.

With that splendid feast, I think I'm going to have a nice, crisp chardonnay here.

Thank you so much for visiting my kitchen.

And happy cooking.