- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

- And I'm Claudine Pepin.

Papa, I'm going on vacation in a few weeks, and I need your help.

I'd like to lose a couple of pounds.

- But you look fine to me.

- Oh, thanks.

But I'd really like to cook some hearty food that's good to eat, and is still kind of - You know, when people go on a diet, they think they can only eat salad, but it's not all you can eat.

There is plenty flavorful and filling meal that you can have.

- Sounds great.

Like what?

- I'll surprise you with a lean feast.

- Next on "Jacques Pepin's Kitchen".

- "Cooking with Claudine".

(train whistle blowing) (cheerful music continues) - I have a surprise for Claudine today.

I'm going to do a special dish for her.

I know that she want to lose a lot of weight going into vacation.

I also know that she really like earthy, good food, and that's what I'm going to do for her today.

A really kind of a healthy, lean, flavorful type of dish.

And I have a corned beef here.

And the corned beef you have to buy on the market, you have to look at it.

Sometime you have the seasoning on top, sometime you don't have the seasoning on top.

One way or the other, you look at it and try to get the leaner piece that you can get.

As you can see, this one doesn't have any fat all around, but a fair amount of fat on top.

So, what I do, what I like to do usually is just rinse it out, (water pouring) take a little bit of that brine out of it, and then remove that layer of fat from the top, you know?

You know, I have a small layer of fat here.

I know the fat does have a certain amount of flavor to it, but it does amount to a great deal of calories, so we remove it.

And that's what I'm going to do here.

In addition to this, you know, we'll take the fat out of the stock as it comes out.

So this now would be pretty lean.

And what we wanna do is to cook this.

And this, of course, has to cook for two and a half hours about.

So, just plain, clean water in it.

(water pouring) We put a lid on top of it, bring it to a light boil.

And when you start boiling, you will see again a gray forming mixture which come to the top.

And that scum, you want to remove with one of those things here.

After a while, when you have removed the scum, and have removed a great deal of the scum before here, you will have only some fat coming to the top.

So what I wanna do here, you know, you wanna move this around.

I try with the bowl of my ladle here to push the fat on one side and pick it up.

And let that meat cool off in the water.

Whatever fat there is will come to the top, and then you can remove it this way.

What you want to end up here is a piece of meat with very lean stock, which is what we have.

And then when you finish that, then you add your vegetable.

Remember, it has been cooking like two and a half hours.

And I just want to put the vegetable at the last moment.

A lot of different type of vegetable.

And cook them like 20, 25 minutes, so that I get bright, strong, tasty vegetable.

I have kohlrabi here.

Kohlrabi come in different way, you know?

Sometime you have the kind of purple color kohlrabi, and it's a nice vegetable.

Remember that, you know, depending the time of the year, this is a kind of a winter dish still.

You want to peel that off.

You can change your vegetable.

This is your kohlrabi.

You see?

I also have turnips.

And this is the regular white turnips.

Again, I would wanna peel that turnips.

You know, there a lot of different type of vegetable that you can get at your market.

Just think about it.

Leek.

Leek, for me, are good and important.

So I put leek.

Only remove one hand of it, and maybe the first layer.

And after that, trim a little bit the greener leaf from the outside.

This way.

And then you can open it as I'm doing here, so that you can wash the inside here.

This one has been washed before as much as I could.

So, this is our vegetable.

We have the leek, we have turnip, we have the kohlrabi.

And in addition to that, we have cabbage and we have carrot here.

And I'm going to put it in the pot now in the same time with a little bit of thyme and bay leaf.

This is my seasoning.

So that's what I have on top of the meat here.

The thyme, bay leaf.

I have my leek.

Couple of carrot.

And as I said, the idea here is not only to have a lot of flavor with all of those different vegetables.

I also have onion.

I have potato and cabbage.

I like the savory cabbage as I have here.

And sometime if I find a small one, I use a small one.

If you don't find a small one, you use a big one.

Cut a piece of it.

What you wanna do there is to cut it into large wedge.

Also like this, remove a little piece of the stem, you know, if you want.

And that's it, you know?

So, as you can see, I have a great deal of different color vegetable in there.

And that will render also juice, you know?

You wanna bring that back to a strong boil.

And after it come to the boil, you wanna cook it for about 20, 20, 25 minutes.

In fact, I'm going to cover this one.

And basically, that's what it look like after it's been cooking all of that time, which is basically three hours, you know?

And now you want to serve this with the juice and the vegetable together.

Very often, that's the way it's served.

And that's what we call in France, Pot-au-Feu.

Pot is the pot.

Pot-au-Feu.

Pot on the fire, if you want.

So, what I have here is that piece of corned beef, which, as you know, has been cooked and trimmed.

I'm gonna put it there.

Cut that into thin slice.

And you can see that it's really nice and trimmed.

As you can see here, I think our recipe goes for four on that piece of thing.

And I think it could serve six too.

Depending how much you want to eat.

But you would have at least two slice per person.

So, what I have here is different condiment to serve with it.

Let's put the vegetable first.

I love that type of Pot-au-Feu for a winter dish.

I love potato in there too.

Lot of green.

Lot of red.

Different color.

Here we are.

I can serve my meat right on top of it, you know?

That type of thing, you wanna serve it very fast in your kitchen so it doesn't have a chance to cool off.

And serve it this way.

Family style with the liquid.

But I would want to serve a bowl of stock like that per person.

And with this, a different array of condiment.

So called, I have a French mustard here.

The cornichon, which is the sour small gherkin done in vinegar, as we do in France.

And this is horseradish from the jar, you know?

You can have it from the jar or you can have your regular horseradish that you can do in different way here.

You can do it on this side.

And this, of course, is going to make you cry.

It's quite, quite strong, you know?

But you grate your horseradish like this, and you can take it out just by (grater banging) banging this out.

You can add it to the other horseradish or only serve fresh horseradish.

And if you have that just before your vacation, a nice portion of it, I guarantee you're going to lose weight.

(jazzy music) - Hello, this is Julia Child.

Is your darling father available?

(Claudine laughing) I've gotten my mother with that.

I've actually gotten my mother with that.

- I love corned beef.

But you know, when you wanna buy corned beef, look at the piece first carefully.

You can see that this one is covered with a thick layer of fat.

Even more so on that one.

The whole side of it, you see?

So, you have the whole top of it is going to be fat.

Not only is it much more caloric, but you really cannot use it.

So look around, and you see a piece like that one.

And that one is basically totally red, bright red.

Just on this side, there is a little bit of silver skin.

This is a good piece of corned beef.

That's what you should be buying.

(cheerful music) - Well, actually Julia called the house, and my mother answered the phone, and it was Julia Child.

"Hello, is your darling father, or is your husband available?"

And my mother was like, "Oh, Claudine, just stop it."

You know?

And it was really her.

(laughs) I don't think she's ever heard me do the impression.

Well, not until now.

(laughs) (cheerful music) Okay, so what are we gonna have for dinner?

- Well, for dinner, we have a bunch of stuff.

The main course is a secret.

I can't tell you.

I wanna tell you what we're going to have to finish and to start.

- Okay.

Well, what do we have here?

- Well, here we have yogurt, as you can see.

And we're going to do a cheese with yogurt.

And this one happened to be non-fat yogurt.

Here, you wanna put this on top of this?

- Okay.

- We're gonna put that right on our strainer like this with cheese cloth.

- Okay.

- For the first thing, yeah.

That's it.

Go ahead, you put it in there.

- All of it?

- Yeah.

This is a non-fat yogurt.

But of course, if you do it with a regular yogurt, it'd be a bit richer, you know?

But you know, this has to stay in there for like 12 hours.

- Do I put it in the refrigerator and leave it?

- Yeah, yeah, I think you leave it- - Okay.

- In the refrigerator.

Put a little bit of plastic wrap on top so nothing fall in it.

You know that what we have here, you know, that's about 12 hours.

So, you see the cheese that we have there?

- Mm-hm.

- I mean, like a cheese, like a, more like a cream cheese if you want.

And look at what we have underneath.

- Oh, look at the whey.

- The whey, you know?

- Mm-hm.

- You can drink that, you know?

That's good.

- [Claudine] No, thank you.

- [Jacques] You don't like it?

- [Claudine] I don't want it.

(Claudine laughing) - No, this is good.

No dinner for you.

You know, remember when we are in France and we have the fromage blanc la creme?

- Mm-hm.

- You know the white cheese?

- Oh, wow.

- The white cheese with cream, and that the same I did in this.

You know, we're going to leave that here.

But remember also, your grandmother sometime does it with garlic.

- That's the way mom likes it.

- You know, scallion.

- With garlic, scallions.

- Parsley.

That's how I like it too.

- Or chives or a whole bunch of stuff.

- And you like it with?

- Sugar, strawberries, bananas.

- Well, we can do both, you know?

So, let's break a bit of garlic together.

Okay, so in there, we'll put maybe those two little clove of garlic.

That should be enough, I think.

Cut the end of it.

And after you've cut the end of it, we can crush it a little bit.

I'll crush that one.

(knife thudding) See here, that will release the skin.

You know?

- Okay.

- All right.

The paper or the skin on the outside.

Sometime better than some of the time.

You can see that.

Okay.

And then I want you do that one.

- Every time I do this, garlic goes sailing across, so I just kind of do this.

- Oh!

- So that my garlic doesn't go sailing across my kitchen behind the refrigerator.

Is that good?

- That's pretty good.

- All right.

Having fingernails to help peel garlic is always essential too.

- Right.

Now we crush it.

That's it.

- Okay, I'll let you crush it.

I will stand back here with a catcher's mitt.

- No, you crush it.

Put this this way here with my hand.

(knife banging) And move a little bit forward like this, you see?

So, I have done that one.

So you go ahead, you try that one here.

- Okay.

Stand in the right position.

- You know, it's a good idea what you do.

You crush it a little bit with your hand now, and then it flatten it and now you can do that.

Yes.

And it won't go anywhere.

(knife banging) That's good.

- Okay.

- Keep it flat on it.

- More?

- Yeah, keep it flat.

That's it.

(knife banging) - I'm a little afraid to cut- - That's it.

- My fingers on the knife.

- Oh.

Oh, that's it, you know?

See, that's good.

So now we chop it fine.

(knife banging) Just like this, rocking the knife.

(knife banging) And clean up the knife.

(knife banging) Okay.

- It's very fine.

- That's plenty garlic, right?

- Yes.

- So, I'm putting it in there.

You're going to mix this.

But don't start mixing right away because you don't want to have overmix it because that can liquefy the yogurt again, you know?

- Oh, okay.

- So, you just want to mix it gently.

So, here is a bit of scallion.

You know, you use chives very often.

The same family, you know, the chive, the scallion.

Stuff like this.

You know what you can do here?

Why don't you put a little bit of salt and pepper on top of this?

Freshly cracked black pepper is very good in there.

- [Claudine] Is that enough?

(knife banging) - Yeah, I think it looks pretty good.

(knife chopping) And I have my parsley here.

That's enough parsley.

And I think that's it.

You know, you can put, remember we put tarragon sometime?

We put different type of herb.

Now you can stir it gently.

Yeah.

- [Claudine] Oh, it looks really pretty.

- Yeah.

- Does it start to take on the color of the herbs?

- Yeah, a little bit.

A little bit.

After a while.

What we are going to do is to re-put it back in there, you know?

- Okay.

- And this, it's really just to, is it good?

- Yeah.

- Enough salt?

- Yep.

- Okay.

And this, we're going to put together.

You have a little piece of string over there.

Sometime, you know, you do cheat and you let it hang like this.

You can even hang it, well, with something underneath so it catch the stuff, you know?

- All right, tell mom you're gonna hang cheese in the house.

She's not gonna be very happy.

- Yeah.

Yes.

Okay, so let's do now what we have here.

- All right.

- Bring the other thing, and we have it on a plate like this.

We can put some of the couture on, you know?

And see, what you wanna do.

It's a bit harder now.

- Oh.

Oh.

- Try to keep it in shape, you know?

- [Claudine] Oh, it looks really nice.

- Yeah.

I put it here.

There you have the nice cheese.

You wanna put some of those around like this.

- Yeah.

Oh, that looks really nice.

- We add a couple more here.

I have one too many here, so I'll give you a piece to taste.

We'll start it.

(knife scraping) Taste it.

I put that there.

- Mm.

That's good.

It's really good.

- [Jacques] Well, let's do the first course now.

- Okay.

- We're going to do spinach, you know, with scallop.

- Okay.

- You see, I have beautiful scallop here.

And we're going to do a sauce with walnut.

You know, those walnut here.

Take the two walnut.

(walnuts cracking) You crack them like this, you know?

- That's what your dad used to do.

- That's what my dad used to do.

Yes.

So, that's what your dad is doing.

- And one day, I'll do it too, but.

- And now I have a mess.

And you know, we take those pieces of walnut.

I have half walnut there.

You know what we're going to do?

We're going to blanch it.

- Why?

- You know what that mean?

Because they're going to be a little bit like fresh walnut.

Remember in France, sometime we crack the walnut, the fresh walnut?

- Yeah.

- You know?

And the fresh walnut, it's kind of a bit soft.

You know, the flesh is a little soft.

And that's what we're going to have.

We do that about 30 seconds.

Not much.

And then why don't you get the spinach?

- There we go.

- Okay, we have about a pound of spinach.

And you see here, if you have large leaf like this, you can hold your leaf like that, and pull out the stem.

You know, like this one?

- Upside down?

- Yeah, you wanna fold it here.

That's it.

- Wow.

- So, it's sort of, it's especially when they are very fibrous.

You see, when they are fibrous, they come even better.

You see, if you fold it this way.

But at that point, this is quite tender.

It's not even necessary to do it with this.

So, let's put them directly, just wet.

The pan is hot here.

- With nothing else?

- Nothing.

No, you don't need to put anything in there.

You can use another type of green also, you know?

This is going to cook quite fast, and we'll put some seasoning after.

If you think that they are not wet enough, you can put a little bit of water.

But we don't need it too here.

So here, we cook it for like a minute.

And this is about 30 second now.

So, I'm going to drain those walnut.

Okay.

You know what, you to cut them into pieces.

I'm gonna cut them into pieces.

- [Claudine] They're a lot lighter in color.

- They are lighter in color, and they are kind of soft.

You know, softer now.

So, (knife banging) we cut them into four or five pieces like that.

Actually, you can do that.

- So it's just coarse.

- You can break them before you blanch them, and put them directly into the water.

This here, if you taste a piece.

Taste a little piece.

Oh, that's mine.

You see, they are soft a little bit.

- Mm.

No, but the flavor is still there.

It's really good.

- The flavor is very strong.

- Yeah.

- [Jacques] Okay, we put that in there now.

- Okay.

- And see our spinach, the way they go down?

They go down to like nothing.

- Wow.

Yeah, but I don't know, I wouldn't, I still wouldn't compromise.

I mean, sometimes I use frozen spinach, but the taste of fresh spinach is really good.

I love spinach.

- No, this makes a big difference.

- Yeah.

- I know it's one of your favorite vegetables.

- Definitely.

- Okay, look at the scallop we're going to have here.

We have about a pound of scallop here.

And you see on top of the scallop- - [Claudine] Mm-hm.

- You have that big sinew here.

For that particular recipe, you want to remove it.

So, this is your scallop.

You rinse them out in case everything.

And those are pretty, pretty large.

So you still have three, four per person depending on the size of it.

And you see, when my spinach are really wilted or getting to be wilted now.

- Oh, it smells really good.

- It's like a steaming process.

We're going to put the scallop right on top of it.

We're going to steam them right on top of the spinach.

Remember, to that extent here now, I haven't put any seasoning in there yet.

- Yeah.

- So I'm gonna put a little bit of salt.

And we'll put some cracked pepper in the sauce.

And I'll cover it.

And that should steam for like about three minutes, you know?

- That's not very long.

- So, during that time, we can do the dressing.

Look at the lemon that I have here.

I wanted to show you how to do zest with lemon, you know?

All of those things, you do zest with it.

You know, whether you grate it here, and sometime you bang it out to get it out of there.

- [Claudine] Mm-hm.

- Sometime people put a little piece of paper there.

You know, like parchment paper.

- Oh!

- You press it in there, so you pull out the paper after.

- And then it, okay.

- Fine.

That's one way of doing it.

What you don't want to do, see, you don't want to get that white stuff underneath- - Why?

- The piece.

Because that's bitter.

- Oh.

- But when you do a zest, it's this area.

You use the skin because this is in the skin that you really have all of the essential oil.

That essential oil burn, you know?

I mean, if I put the, look.

- Whoa!

- It burns it.

(Claudine laughing) You see?

- Yes.

- And what comes out of it, what you do perfume with it.

And when you do a, when you do a custard, for example, if you were to put the lemon juice, this is a citric acid, it would curdle the milk.

So, you put the skin.

You know, that's where you get the taste.

But otherwise, zest, you do this with this.

You know, thin slice like this, that make beautiful zest.

- [Claudine] Mm.

- And then you could put that together and do a Julienne, you know?

That's what we call the Julienne.

That's one way of doing it.

So, the Julienne is going to be those tiny, tiny strip.

You get the Julienne together now, and you cut it like that.

You have a kind of coarse zest, you know?

- [Claudine] It smells good.

- So, let's put the zest with your walnut.

That.

Okay, salt and cracked pepper there.

And you want your olive oil.

And of course, we have lemon.

What we need is lemon juice, right?

- That would be good.

- Press it between your finger like this, you know?

Just to try to strain it out so that you don't take the pit in there.

The pit, which of course has what we call- - [Claudine] I feel like I lost one.

- Le Pepin in French.

So we are Le Pepin.

Those are Le Pepin, you know?

Okay.

And then I would put a good virgin olive oil in there.

You stir it.

- Okay.

- Go ahead.

See, you don't want the dressing to be together.

You want it basically to be separated here.

You see, this is a very fast dish, and relatively light.

It depend how much dressing you put on top of it, you know?

We want something light here.

So, you have those steam spinach here.

You wanna drain them out.

You can see there is a great deal amount of liquid, it's amazing, coming out of it.

And we started with nothing at all.

You know?

- Oh, the color's beautiful.

And it smells great.

- I think I'll put one, two, three, maybe four scallop in it.

What do you think?

- That sounds good.

- And you want to put your au jus sauce on top.

That looks good.

Maybe, that's it.

Yes.

All you would wanna do there is maybe drip a few, a little bit on the spinach, you know?

- Wow.

Looks beautiful.

- And then we can put that on the table.

And this is the steamed scallop on spinach with walnut sauce as our first course today.

And this is your surprise main course.

- [Claudine] Well, that's a good surprise.

- Yes.

I know you love Pot-au-Feu.

It's a different type of Pot-au-Feu usually with beef or poultry.

But this is corned beef.

And then you have carrot, you have potato, you have turnips, you have kohlrabi, you have leek, you have cabbage, a lot of vegetables with it.

You know, one dish in all.

So, I know you would love this.

- Mm-hm.

With mustard - And of course, you have that with cornichon, mustard, and horseradish.

- Horseradish.

- You like that stuff, right?

- Oh, definitely.

Oh, that's great.

- Even though this is kind of earthy, we're going to do a very elegant first course.

And the very elegant first course you cook with me, eat the scallop, which are steamed right on top of spinach, you know, with your walnut sauce.

And that's kind of very elegant.

It could be a main course also, you know?

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

And for finish, or to start, you can serve that with (indistinct), the herb yogurt cheese here.

And I think with that kind of earthy corned beef, I would serve as Zinfandel here.

(indistinct) Maybe a Marco, a Marco Nunez.

- Sounds great.

- You know where we come from in the lower part of Burgundy, around Marco?

It's a very good, sprightly, delicious wine.

And I hope you're going to try that menu as we have done it together.

I'm sure you're going to enjoy it.

And happy cooking.

- Happy cooking.

(cheerful music)