- This is one of my favorite snack with drink, and it's very easy to do.

All you do is to put slice of tomato, a bit of salt on it, some cheese, I like gruyere cheese, and on top of that, pepper flake, dash of oil, 10 minutes in the oven, they are perfect.

I'm Jacques Pepin, this is fast food, my way.

Happy cooking.

I'm going to do a great soup, and very easy soup today, starting with scallion, onion, corn, and hominy.

So the first thing that I do is to put oil in that sturdy Dutch oven there, and you start with the scallion.

Put a little bit of chopped onion.

Can be chopped coarsely, you know, it's not really very important for that.

Here we are.

We mix that in.

Cook it like a minute or so, and then we add most of the rest of our ingredients.

This is that kind of hominy, and this is a type of corn which is treated with lye, and kind of explode, get much larger.

It's a very addictive type of taste, quite different than anything else.

Tomato.

We have chicken stock here.

And then I have some green salsa here that I made with tomatillo, which is part of the berry family, actually.

It's part of a very sour type of berry.

And with this, I'm going to put garlic.

I have some thyme here, thyme leaves.

A little bit of cinnamon in this.

Just a dash of cinnamon.

And then some cumin.

And finally, some garlic.

And the soup is going to cook for about 10, 15 minutes.

You bring it to a boil, cook it 10, 15 minutes, and we're going to finish it later on with cilantro at the end, and some fresh corn.

So the garlic again, you know, here I'm going crazy with the garlic.

Four or five clove of garlic.

Just coarsely chopped, you know.

That's it.

And this now will come to a boil.

Lower the heat a little bit after it boils and simmer it 10, 15 minutes.

And now the main course of our dish is going to be a mixture of blackfish, a beautiful sea bass here, black sea bass.

And Chinese restaurants use that a lot.

It's one of the finest fish, in my opinion.

This has been scaled, of course, and the skin is very, very delicate and light, so you leave the skin on.

But the fish will be cooked a little later.

We start first with chorizo and a potato.

So I'm going to cut some chorizo into slice.

And the chorizo is, of course, a Spanish sausage, which is kind of spicy.

You could replace that with andouille, for example, here.

Or if you don't like something very spicy, you can go with a calbesa.

I am going to put some oil in there.

A little bit of olive oil.

My chorizo.

Here it is.

And potato.

I have two potato there, which are peeled ahead, as you can see, and you can do that ahead, providing you keep them in water.

If you don't keep them in water, they will tend to discolor, which actually doesn't really make that much difference for that, because even if they discolor after that, you won't see it by the time they are cooked.

If you wanna peel your potato, cut a place so that you're on top of it.

Cut a face, if you want, so that it doesn't rolling under your finger.

That can be dangerous.

And I'll put that to cook.

That's going to cook about seven, eight minutes.

That's it, I have plenty potato there.

And with that dish, we're going to do mussel.

And the mussel I'm going to cook with wine and water.

Put that a little bit here.

Look at your mussel, and make sure that they're all closed.

It used to be that I would press them on the side to try to make them open, because they would be full of mud.

That did happen.

I used to pick up my mussel in Connecticut.

Now they are grown, and the one grown on wire.

And usually there is no sand in there, so it's quite nice.

However, you still look if there is any piece of beard to remove it.

And particularly if they are open, I don't see any open here, then you kind of discard it.

Or what happened, if that mussel is open, I bang it.

If it's closed, it's because it's live.

Just happened for here.

So we're going to put that directly into a skillet with some white wine, a little bit of water, and that will open in about three, four minutes.

Then what we'll do is to take the shell, at least one of the shell, and keep the one with the meat in it, strain the juice, and we'll add that to our chorizo later on.

They are doing fine now.

There we go.

(pan sizzling) That piece fell on the stove, so don't put it back in it.

Eat it.

I love chorizo, it's very spicy.

This is doing well.

The mussel are now cooked.

We can see that they are totally open.

So what you wanna do is to cool them off a little bit before you open them.

Or you can open them this way, and we put them on the side like this.

You know, the mussel that we get in France are called the moule de bouchot, and they are kind of yellow inside and very full.

And we used to have that type of mussel in Connecticut years ago.

When I first moved to Connecticut, close to 30 years ago, I used to go musseling.

There was a place, I mean, like the bottom of the river there, which came out an outlet, an inlet of the sea, and the whole bottom was covered with mussel, and we used to get a lot of those.

The mussel can also be eaten raw.

You know, and raw, they are quite good.

Usually around Toulon in the south of France, they give you raw mussel, and they are very red inside, very iodine.

And you know, you clean up all of your mussel.

This way, that can be done ahead.

For those shell, you don't need it.

And you have to be careful at that point, you know, to pour out the juice here.

And you don't have to filter it through.

All you have to do is to let it rest for a second, and pour it gently, you know, and you will see, you'll see that at the end of it, there is a certain amount of sand and dirt, or whatever, so don't pour the end of it.

That's it.

Now the mussel are going to go right in there, to be mixed and served with the fish, and with the juice here.

But there is another dish that I wanted to show you.

My mother used to do all the time since I have opened mussel here.

When I was a kid, this is much less expensive actually than the clam, you know, or actually oyster, that often that dish is made with.

And you just open your mussel as I did here, put them on the first course, like they did in a little gratin dish, and then we put kind of a snail butter, you know, with it, or olive oil, you know, it's done with it.

I put pepper on it, you know, then a little bit of garlic, chop the garlic, you chop a bit of parsley with it, and that mixture of parsley and garlic is called persillade in France.

Persil is parsley, and ail is garlic.

So persillade, which is one word, is that mixture of garlic and parsley.

This is certainly the signature of cooking at home, even in small restaurant.

My mother will do tomato, she saute tomato, she put persillade at the end.

She saute potato, put persillade.

Saute a piece of fish, persillade at the end.

Saute a steak, persillade at the end.

We eat a lot of persillade here.

So this, you can mix that with butter, or actually even with olive oil.

Perfectly fine.

Here I have it here.

Olive oil, maybe, right in there.

Dash of salt in this.

And we wanna put bread on top.

But first, you put that into your muscle.

This is a great dish that can be done ahead.

In a small restaurant, people would do that.

Have it ready to pop it in the hot oven.

You have your six muscle, you charge $8.95 for it.

You're making really good.

A bit of bread.

I don't need much, a little bit of fresh bread crumb always we put on top here, so I can do it by hand.

Put on top.

That's it.

You know what you do when you use bread crumb on top of something like that?

It's always nice to moisten it with a dash of oil.

And the reason is that otherwise it will tend to burn.

When there is some oil on top of it, then not enough to make it gooey, but just enough to moisten it like this.

And that's fine, you know, you would put that on top.

You have enough here for two or three.

And I guess just before I put it into the oven, I would put a dash of white wine on top of this, you know.

That's a great dish, easy to do.

But with our fish, our chorizo here, we can now cook the fish with that.

And I can put that in the oven also.

So very simply, this we're going to put it directly under the broiler and cooking it only one side, skin side up.

And that will cook in a couple of minutes, you know.

So what I do is to put salt and pepper on this.

Here we are.

You can score the skin of the fish, you know.

Sometimes the scoring, I can do one or two, you will see it mix it up and it look good and it cooks a little faster.

Okay, oil it again.

Put oil in my finger because you really want very little here.

Here we are.

And that should go under the broiler for a couple of minutes.

I'll put that in the oven and I'll put this one also.

We'll go here and this one I'm going to put on the side here.

And it shouldn't take more than two or three minutes to cook it.

During that time, the potato here are cooked.

Chorizo are more than cooked.

They are practically burned, but they are good this way.

I put the mussel in there and the juice of the mussel which has been, as you know, filtered.

Okay, all of that coming to a boil and that's it.

This is ready.

And now let's check the soup to see where we're at here.

Soup has been boiling nicely here.

I think we're ready to continue with the soup and it's very easy.

All we have to do at the end is corn and that fresh corn here.

Very often people try to cut corn and move this way.

And as you can see, the knife is out and kind of dangerous to come this way.

And all of it, the question of position of the knife.

You see from that position here, you move here and you start here and you finish there.

And all of a sudden everything become very easy to cut because you're using the knife properly cutting rather than crushing forward.

And you can do it the other way if you're a bit afraid but basically you go, you move forward.

That is you don't crush it down.

You go from here to there, from here to there.

Here is the corn.

Can even clean up that part of it.

The corn, you know, for me just come to a boil and it's enough.

So here we are.

I'm gonna put the cilantro in it.

All of that can go together to finish the soup.

Okay.

It's basically come back to a boil or even if it's staying that hot liquid, it's enough to cook the corn.

In summer, that's how I cook my corn.

I put them in boiling water, let them come back to a boil, shut it off and leave them there.

We have a nice bowl of chowder here.

That with a piece of cornbread, it's a whole meal in itself.

(soothing music) Now let me check on the fish.

That's cooked.

This is almost cooked under the broiler.

You can see that this is curled up nicely.

It's a fresh fish.

And that would be ready to be served.

But I don't want to leave that too long under the broiler.

I'm gonna check it again because yeah, it's going to be ready.

Could be a bit browner than that, but that's beautiful.

And if I leave it longer, I'm going to burn it.

So here it is.

Nice dish.

Remind me of my youth.

And now with this, we're gonna serve the potato and the mussel.

Okay.

And you serve right, a piece of fish right in the center of it.

A little bit of parsley on top.

Maybe just a leaf of parsley is fine like this.

This is it.

I can't wait to taste that one here.

I know this is hot, very hot.

And I'm gonna taste it anyway.

It's really good.

Really, really good.

That was a good mussel.

(soft music) And with that, of course, I cook the chorizo with this and I put it on top of my mussel also.

So a sancerre, one of my favorite wine.

This is a wine from the Loire Valley in France.

It's actually a Sauvignon Blanc, but it's very grassy too.

And this goes very well with it.

And as I'm tasting that, I realized that I have garlic and onion here.

This was supposed to go into my, but this is what the cooking is all about.

Variation.

One day you put it in, one day you forget it.

And sometimes you discover a new recipe.

Anyway.

I'm going to do a very simple dessert with banana.

I just cut that lime in half.

And you can see that I'm pressing, pressing, pressing, and nothing is happening.

Look at that.

So sometimes there is no juice in those things.

What you do, you put them in the microwave oven and or in boiling water, like 10, 15 seconds, or then you roll it like that, just to crack the texture, the fiber inside.

One way also, as you can see, this one was cut across.

If you cut them without really touching the center of the pit here, and this one was in the microwave for about 20 seconds.

I mean, look at that.

I have a lot of juice in this one.

That's great.

I'm very proud of myself on that one.

So more juice.

We developed that recipe last winter when I was skiing with Jean-Claude.

A smuggler on notch near Stowe.

And at night we do drink a lot of wine and we had no dessert.

We had guests coming, but we had banana because we always have to have banana.

Claude loves banana.

So I say, well, we have banana.

I add some honey and we add some bourbon.

We just mix it together and add our banana and bourbon.

That was very good.

So I decided to do a little recipe in remembrance of that day skiing, you know?

So here I have a mixture of lime juice, honey and bourbon.

If you don't wanna do any dessert, just drink this.

That's fine.

But now we put our banana to marinate in this or macerate.

Here it is.

And the beauty of it, of course, is that if you do it this way, since there is acidity in there, it's not going to discolor.

If you were to leave those banana outside, of course, they will discolor.

If you slide your fingers, you go down.

Each time you go against your finger and get about the same slice banana.

Okay, I have two banana here.

Probably enough, but put another one.

There is plenty variation like that that you can do with fruit.

And for me, it's always the best dessert, you know?

So in our recipe that night, all we did actually was to take some cookie.

We add cookie with our beautiful butter cookie.

Break them into a nice bowl.

I don't think we had a bowl quite as nice as that one, but and then fill it up.

The juice will go to the bottom and absorb with the cookie.

And that's basically it, you know?

You would want to, if you want, put some sliced almond on top of it, give it a bit of crunch.

And even a little piece of those twirl of the, you know, with that little machine here, that's good.

And that's a nice dessert, very simple.

Now you wanna do a variation.

Very easy, take the same cookie or another cookie in the bottom, slightly richer.

We put a bit of sour cream here or creme fraiche, whatever is hanging around.

More cookie.

No, no, more banana.

Should have put the banana first.

Doesn't matter really.

You can put that with ice cream too.

It's really good with ice cream.

So we put this.

The juice, the juice is the best, of course.

Maybe we have enough cookie.

Maybe a couple more cookie.

A bit of sour cream extra.

Another couple of banana slice on top of it.

Now to be a bit different, I have some pistachio here.

Can put the pistachio right on top or you can crush them if you want.

Put your pistachio right there.

That's another dessert.

Very easy to do.

Go skiing with your friend, drink some wine, do simple dessert and enjoy life.

Happy cooking.