- Hello, I'm Jacques Pepin.

We often have guests from the food industry at my home, and I like to create an interesting menu for them, give them something out of the ordinary.

It's always fun to surprise people with combination they'd never think of.

A potpourri of flavor and texture.

Scallop ceviche is made without oil, so it's lean.

Hot pepper, cilantro, and mint give it a real kick.

Fricassee of veal has a rich fragrance that come from the bouquet garni.

I'll show you how to make those little packet, then serve the veal on a bed of Wehani brown rice.

The third is custard made with skim milk and only a little sugar.

The sauce is blueberry, jam, and cognac.

A perfect ending that seem rich but is light on your stomach.

So join me for my personal potpourri.

We'll surprise your guests, too, on Today's Gourmet.

(jazzy upbeat music plays) (jazzy upbeat music continues) (jazzy upbeat music continues) (jazzy upbeat music continues) (lid clinks) You know, I do a lot of different type of food at home.

I like to mix taste.

I like to do a bit of an unusual menu, and that's what we are today doing today.

And you know, a type of potpourri, which is rolling in a melting pot, USA.

And even though I'm going to do a very classic, in a sense, fricassee of veal with rice, we are going to start with a ceviche, which is spelled with S or a C, a type of raw fish mixture (plate whooshes on counter) (plastic bag crinkles) done in different part of the world, particularly South America, very spicy, and all this.

Today, I'm going to do that with scallop.

I have a whole area of different thing from red onion, beautiful tomato, I have lime, I have hot pepper, lime juice, I have mint and coriander, which is called coriander or cilantro or Japanese parsley or Chinese parsley, and scallop.

We're doing it with scallop, too.

As you can see here, I have some of the scallop with a little muscle on top of it.

This I'm going to remove because it's a bit tougher, and we cut those muscle into piece.

The ceviche, of course, as we do often at home, I do a mixture of scallops, sometime shrimp, and sometime different type of fish or doing it only with one or the other.

The scallop are quite low in calorie, and that dish altogether is very low in calorie also because we are not putting any oil or anything in it (bowl taps counter) that very often I do, but not in that recipe.

To make it easier, you know, (plastic bag crinkles) I'm putting that directly (bowl taps counter) into a plastic bag, (plastic bag crinkles) a Ziploc type of bag, to make it marinade or macerate in it, you know?

So what I have in there, I have some onion, you know, a lot of onion, the red onion.

And I have, (bowl taps counter) well, I have a tiny bit of sugar here to give me a certain, a certain characteristic with the sugar.

Some salt.

We're not going to use any oil here.

I put a bit of paper in it, (pepper crunches) freshly ground black pepper, even though I will put some other seasoning.

Here, I have the cilantro and the mint that we're going to coarsely chop, (knife taps counter) you know, gathering it together (knife taps rapidly) and coarsely cutting it this way.

The mint are really a very fresh, delicate taste, you know, (knife taps rapidly) and especially when you have hot pepper, like hot pepper with the mint and the coriander.

I mean, the combination (plastic bag crinkles) is really terrific.

So we put that in there.

This can be done a few hours ahead, you know, so that it has the time to cook.

When I say to cook, it mean like the citric acid, an acidic acid, I have vinegar here, I have a rice vinegar, you can use any other type of vinegar in it actually, (plastic bag crinkles) and lime juice, (juice trickles) all of those are acid, which are going to so-call, quote, cook the fish.

(bowl taps on counter) It will set up the protein.

It going all whitish-like you know, when it's been cooked this way.

So there is different way of cooking, if you want.

So we take the core of the tomato, (knife taps counter) cutting it in half, you know, parallel to the stem.

I can spread this out (knife taps counter rapidly) and then cut that into the little dice.

(knife taps rapidly) That will, again, not only give me color and all that taste to this.

(knife clanks) Here, I put that in there also.

(plastic bag crinkles) Okay, then now, I'm putting hot pepper, and this is jalapeno pepper.

(knife taps) So, you know, you have to cut it and you have kind of touch it to test it to see how hot they are.

If they are really hot, (knife taps rapidly) this one is not that hot, then I remove the seed.

I remove the seed and the ribbon side.

This is the hardest part.

If they are not too hot, chop it fairly fine.

Put it in there.

And a bit of lemon peel we put in there.

And I usually use the skin, you know, of the lime here, which is very good.

We put it together and making a fine julienne of this.

You see?

(knife taps gently) Here we are.

(knife clinks on counter) In there.

(knife clinks on counter) (plastic bag crinkles) And that's about all we want to put in there; I'll close it and toss it.

(plastic bag crinkles) This, as I say, has to stay a couple of hours.

We don't have the time to let it.

When it's finished, you put it back directly into your bowl to serve it, you know?

(plastic bag crinkles) And now, what I would like to do is to show how to serve it with cucumber, you know?

And we do cucumber (peeler whooshes) that we peel, (peeler clinks) cut in half, (knife taps) (knife clinks) and this is English cucumber, so you can leave the center of it, (knife taps counter) cut it in pieces like that, into little strip like this, and we want to serve that as a garnish.

But I will serve it here doing (plate clatters) little strip of this four, five strip per person like that, to do a decoration, and that's how you would want to serve (knife clinks) your ceviche, you know?

Right in the middle of that (bowl clatters) with the juice and all, you know?

And while this would be the first course of our meal, (spoon clatters in bowl) and now what I want to show you, the next course we are going to do, a veal, and I want to show you how to season the veal.

(peelings thud) And what I have here, a whole area of different type of herb, you know?

I have the herb de provence.

Very often, I was asked when I do classes or when I do show, I use herb de provence, and it's a mixture of thyme, savory, marjoram and oregano.

You already have those four.

Now, in addition, you can add, if you want, those are seeds, and those are, you can use any seed or fennel seed, those are fennel seed, sage, and finally rosemary.

And sometime, even, people put those little flowers of lavender, and what you do, you mix those together, you know?

If you wanna do your own, because you can buy it in the market, but it cost a little fortune, you know?

So as I say, again, those four are the must.

Those other, wine, you may add it if you want to.

I like to mix a lot of different thing.

(bowls clink) And even the flowers that I say, of the lavender, which absolutely look beautiful.

You know this is a great thing to do for a gift.

You give that for a friend for Christmas.

You do little, you know, a little jar, a beautiful jar (dishes clatter) like that with a label on top, close it, and offer that for Christmas.

I think it's a great thing.

Now, I know the seasoning that we use is what we call the bouquet garni, and the bouquet garni can be done dry.

That is, you put a piece of cheesecloth, and you put, like, peppercorn in it.

Then again, dry herb, you see, you use it dry when you want to put it into a stew or something else.

And you want to be able to retrieve it.

So you do your old garnish of whatever you want, maybe a bay leaf (bay leaf crunches) and all of those herb, you know, I dry them in the microwave oven.

Those actually, you know, you can tighten it up, and that's it; it can go into a stew, and you can remove it at the end.

Now what we want to do, if the regular bouquet garni, (parsley crunches) and that's done with parsley stem, that's when you use your parsley stem, fresh thyme, and bay leaf.

That basically what we use in France.

Very often, you know, we put a piece of carrot, other things in it, but you don't really have to.

Those three, you must, and this is what I'm going to do.

I'm going to use this here actually to season the veal that we are going to do next.

So this is my bouquet garni classic here.

And we are going to season the veal with that.

(bowl taps counter) So here we have it.

I have a shoulder of veal.

And the shoulder of veal is really very inexpensive, relatively inexpensive, and the best to do a stew because it's moist, it's tender, and what we want to do here, you know, we cut, you can do a beautiful roast with that, you know, but here we have a piece (veal smacks counter) I would want to remove most of the sinew, basically all the fat you know (veal smacks counter) to give it pretty lean.

Remember that the veal is quite lean, but you still have to remove most of the fat.

And what I like to do is to cut it in fairly large chunk (veal smacks counter) like this, two or three chunk per person, you know?

We doing that recipe about (knife taps) two pound, you know, and the piece cut in about two, two-and-a-half, two-and-a-half inches, you know, fairly large.

That long sinew is very good in the middle because that turn into gelatin like when it cooks.

So I have basically enough here.

That's what I would have, and this of course, I have some browning here (bowl clangs) is what I have here (pot grinds on burner) browning, which is (meat sizzles) the same veal, very lean with a little bit of olive oil.

(spoon clangs in pot) (pot grinds on burner) And that has been browning for the fricassee.

What we do on top of that is to put onion, and I put a lot of onion in it, like three cup of onion.

That will brown in there.

(food sizzles) Our bouquet garni right in the middle.

That will season it.

And garlic.

So I have a bunch of garlic here.

Four or five cloves of garlic.

You know, again, we crush (hand smacks knife) the garlic (hand smacks knife) this way.

(hand smacks knife) (knife whooshes) I love to use garlic.

You could even slice it here.

But it doesn't really matter.

You don't really have to (knife taps rapidly) chop it very, very fine.

Remember it's going to cook a long time.

My garlic.

(knife clangs on pot) And then, we use an old technique here, a French technique we call to singe.

That is, it's a thickening agent to put a little bit of flour on top of the meat.

This is a little bit what the Cajun (bowl clatters) do when they do a roux, and we stir that together.

(spoon clangs on pot) You want to cook it, you know, a couple of minutes with the flour and really mix it well so the flour is nicely incorporated into it.

Here I have here, we put our salt in it, water, you know, like a cup-and-a-half of water.

You don't want too much water because the meat will render a lot of water, too.

(spoon clangs on pot) Now, you cover it, and you want to cook it slowly.

(lid clangs lightly) You wanna bring it to a boil and you want it to boil slowly for like an hour, an hour-and-a-quarter.

No?

(glass clinks) Of course, I have one ready here after an hour-and-a-quarter, an hour-and-a-half.

Here is about what it looks like.

(lid dings) You know, as you can see, a lot of juice came out of it.

(spoon clangs on pot) I still have my bouquet garni here, which I could keep or remove.

Most of the time, (spoon taps pot) of course, we remove it before we serve it.

Those are nice pots.

You can serve it directly at the table.

And with that now, we do a garnish of tiny boiled onion.

I have those tiny pearl onion, so-called.

We peel them, put them with a bit of water, boil them five, six minutes.

They are just about tender enough.

(onions plop) That goes directly into my stew.

(pot clanks) I have button mushroom here, which I washed just before I'm using it.

That goes directly into it, too.

And at that point, even though I could use it, (pot grinds on burner) this is perfectly fine this way, and often at home, we do it this way without any cream or anything.

But if I want to be a bit fancier (spoon clanks on pot) for the weekend, if I have guests and make it a bit richer, then I put a little bit of cream.

You don't have to put much.

I put about a-third of a cup of cream here, and a-third of a cup of cream, as you see, this is recipe for four, but we are very generous here.

That could be easily for six.

(spoon clinks on pot) And basically, you know, you cover that and cook it for a couple of minutes, and as I say, you can leave even your bouquet garni in it, cook it for a few minutes (lid clinks lightly) and this is it.

You can bring that directly to the table this way.

(lid clinks) And it's terrific.

Now with this, what we are going to do, is a rice, a special type of rice, that I have here.

I love those type of rice.

(dishes clatter) And I have that pot that (pot clanks) I'm going to cook here.

(pot taps lightly on counter) (pot clanks) And this is a small sautoir.

Again, a dash of olive oil in there.

And we have here a special rice.

You know, we have Wehani rice, and the Wehani rice is a red rice with all of the fiber outside.

It has to cook a long time, at least an hour, you know, and it's very chewy and elastic.

It's terrific, you know, so the Wehani rice actually is grown in California right here.

Very good rice.

And I have pumpkin seed with it.

Most pumpkin seed are shelled, you know, (bowl clanks) of course, but without any salt or anything like that, the pumpkin seed is very, very high fiber that we have here, a lot of roughage.

And onion, and now, I have a mowoy onion here.

Mowoy, a very sweet type of onion.

(knife taps rapidly) And we slice it and chop it coarsely.

You know, conventionally, when you cook rice, you always count approximately from one-and-a-half to twice the volume of your rice for liquid, (knife clatters) which goes with it.

The rice that we have in Europe, smaller rice like arborio, or in France we have small round rice in Camargue, so it's about one-and-a-half times (pot clangs) the volume.

That is, if you have one cup of rice like that, you have one-and-a-half cup of liquid, water, chicken stock, usually water.

I'm putting that in there, too.

However, in conventional, in conventional rice from California as well as other part of the South, (pot clangs) you know, where we have rice, Carolina rice, it should be one to two, you know?

By the time we get to those type of rice, it's like two-and-a-half times.

I mean, I have a cup of rice here, and I have two-and-a-half cup of water.

(bowl thuds lightly) So that's what we have.

We saute that for about a minute, (pot clangs) you know, get some color and all that.

I mix my rice in it (dishes clatter) and that rice is going to be very chewy and elastic, (pot clangs) you know?

We put it here (pot clangs) (bowl clinks) and the water.

(water gushes) That sound like a lot of water, but believe me, you need that amount of water.

A dash of salt.

(lid clanks) Cover it.

You bring it to a boil, and you boil it gently, gently for an hour-and-a-half.

And now ,I have one which is ready here.

(plate thuds lightly) We're going to serve it.

I have the rice here (lid clicks) and as you see, which has been totally absorbed, you know, with the liquid (spoon clanks) and our fricassee here, which is finishing cooking.

So here, what you could do, you could serve it on a plate directly arranging it on the outside, you know, to put your rice in the center or you can serve it separate.

You know, when you do this, one of the best ways really to put it right in the center.

Don't worry about it because after with the back of your spoon, that when you start spreading out a kind of border that you do, you know?

And you don't care whether the center is a little dirty since it's going to be hidden with the stew anyway.

(spoon clinks) So that's what I have here.

I have my stew right there.

I will take another spoon, cleaner.

I'm sure that those mushroom cook another two or three minute but, basically, they look great to me, and this is what we are going to send.

I have an interesting mixture because, I mean, my mother would probably recognize the stew, you know, as being a very country type of French, but I'm sure she's never tasted that rice.

Well, she may have had when she came to see me in Connecticut, but I don't remember; in any case, I'm sure she would love it.

And as you can see here, we have quite a lot.

What I have here would be more than enough for four, and I still have some left right here.

And now, for our eclectic potpourri (foreign word).

We're going to do a dessert.

We're going to do a really, a classic dessert, which is a custard, you know, as we do in France, except we used to do it with the caramel underneath, which I've eliminated.

And it's a very, very lean custard.

I'm doing it with skim milk and with two eggs for four people, a little bit of sugar, and it's even a bit too lean, so to make it a bit more luscious, we're putting a sauce on top.

Of course, the sauce used to be chocolate sauce or custard sauce, then with egg yolk and cream, and now, what we're going to do is a fruit sauce with a little bit of cognac in it.

But to start with then, (egg taps) very simply break two eggs (egg taps) in there.

(shell crunches) We can beat that directly with a fork.

(fork clatters) (egg sloshes) Be sure that you really mix it well because you don't want pieces of egg white like this.

You know those egg whites have to be totally separated.

So you go from one end to the other end of your bowl and that's it.

(fork clinks) Then the sugar in it.

We have a cup-and-three-quarter of skim milk.

All that is mixed together (liquid sloshes) and some vanilla.

(liquid sloshes) Now I have here, I could have take vanilla beans.

You know, vanilla beans, of course, is absolutely terrific.

And what you do, you have to keep it in sugar to flavor your sugar, or then you have to boil it in the milk to flavor the milk, then you take them out, you dry (claps) them, and you put them back in your sugar, and you can use them for a while this way.

When you finish use them, after a while they get too dry, you can put them in a little coffee grinder and make powder out of it and mix that with sugar again.

We put here vanilla, you know, and (fork clatters) make sure to use vanilla, not vanillin, I-N at the end.

You want pure vanilla extract.

Remember that vanilla is made of (liquid sloshes) orchid and there is many type of orchid.

There is many type of vanilla, you know?

Don't buy certain vanilla (fork clinks) which come from South America because sometime there is coumarin in it, and coumarin is a blood thinner.

And because the labeling is different than in the US, you don't know whether it's in it or not.

So I try to avoid those type of vanilla.

The vanilla extract we have here is in an alcohol base, but as I say, some from Europe, you can have them in powder or in water base, you know, which is a bit different, so what we want to do there is to strain our custard directly on top of those little molds.

Those little molds are two-third of a cup about.

So that's just about right to do four of those with our cup-and-three-quarter of milk.

I think this one need (strainer clinks) a little bit from there.

And we want to cook that, the custard, we cook that with water around.

Remember, it is important that if the heat transfer, what we call a (foreign word) in France, so the (foreign word), (water trickles) is when you put water around and the heat go very slowly through the heat transfer.

It goes slowly.

If the water boil, this is going to cook too fast.

If it cook too fast, it's going to start expanding.

That is, the albumin, which is the egg white, will expand.

It's going to start going up, and when you unmold it, it's going to be like a sponge.

All around, it's going to look like a sponge.

So we don't want to.

I'm going to bring that back in.

You want to cook this there, (pan clanks on rack) and I want to show you, I have one here just cooked.

I wanna show you what it looks like (oven door thuds) when it comes out of the oven.

And as you can see here, you know, it is just (mold clinks in pan) shaky a little bit.

You should be able to put your knife in it and come out and be clean, you know?

(knife clinks) And that's tell you whether it's cooked or not.

Hm, this one actually could take a little more cooking.

You see on the side it's clean.

In the center is still a little bit wet, but it should be shaky like this.

These have to cool off, you know, cool off before you can unmold it, and that's what we have here.

We have some which are cold.

(dishes clatter lightly) So what we are going to do is unmold it.

And to do that, you take it straight, and you run your knife.

Be sure to put your knife straight and move the little ramekin around.

You know, people will have a tendency to put the knife on the slant and cut some of it.

So your knife has to be really straight.

Move it around.

Put your plate (plates clatter lightly) upside down this way and turn it there.

And you can shake it, shake it, to, and just hope that it's going to come down.

(ramekin taps plate) What it need it a bit of air, so sometime you have to push it from the side to get air to go into it.

(dishes clatter) And as we have here, we are going to do a sauce.

The sauce that we have here is made of beautiful jam.

See the best sauce for me, for jam are going to be the best possible quality jam you can get.

Here, I have large piece in it, even of apricot.

This is an apricot sauce.

We want to dilute it with a little bit of cognac.

(cognac trickles) You know, of course if you don't have alcohol, then you forget the cognac.

The cognac is a brandy from the area of France, which is called Cognac, you know, and it can only be called Cognac if it come from there.

(spoon and bowl clatter) I could even put a little bit of water in there.

I have a little bit of water left or a bit more cognac, but water would be fine with my jam.

And that make a great fruit sauce, you know, any type of jam, any type of fruit, for that matter.

We wanna put that on top of it, you know?

And that, of course, even though the custard is not that rich, with this on top, it's going to come very nice and very rich.

We're going to decorate that maybe with a tiny eatable flowers here, which is beautiful.

Maybe a bit of green.

And now we have a splendid dessert to have with our fricassee of veal.

And now it's time to eat.

I'm gonna take the custard with me, proceed to the dining room.

You know, I receive a lot of people at my house in Connecticut, and I cook, my wife cook, sometime we fight a little bit over the stove, but not very often.

I was born in France but, of course, I've been here a long time.

I'm an American citizen, but my wife was born in New York, is Puerto Rican and Cuban.

So we have a lot of mixed friend.

We have Jewish friend, we have Chinese friend, we have Belgium friend and so forth, and we try to mix and make people taste a bit of different type of cuisine.

And that's what we have today with our beautiful ceviche here.

Spicy, you know, with a lot of acidity, no fat at all, you need very low calorie.

You may or may not want to put the cilantro, if you find it that it's too strong.

Put another type of herb.

Then we have our fricassee of veal more in the French style.

Remember I put a little bit of cream, like a-third of a cup for the whole thing.

And you may want to omit it if you want, which will cut down on your calorie again.

A very sweet and elastic rice go so well with it.

And with that of course, we have a salad already.

A salad.

And finally, the beautiful custard that we have here.

Remember, the custard is only 10% of the calorie in that custard are through fat.

It's very light with our fruit sauce on top.

And with that, a glass of red wine.

We have a Zinfandel here, which for me, a very, very American wine, (wine trickles).

Very berry, light, (glass dings) spritely wine (indistinct) from California.

And I'm going to enjoy it with my meal.

I hope you do that meal for your friend.

Be daring; do things that'll be different.

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

I enjoy making it for you.

Happy cooking.

(jazzy upbeat music plays)