- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

You know one of the real pleasure of cooking in this day and age is that we can use technique and ingredients from all over the world.

There are no rule anymore about mixing cuisine and ethnic food as long as everything tastes good separately and together.

To show you, I'm going to make a very international menu today using ingredients that you can find in your local supermarket.

From the Gulf Coast of the United States, come our first course Crab Cakes in a avocado sauce, Moving south to Mexico, I'll show you my own favorite recipe for homemade guacamole and tortilla chips.

Our main course is from Ireland, a rich and hearty lamb stew with lots of vegetables.

And for the dessert, a specialty of Portugal, little flowers made from sweet figs and almond.

It's a melting pot menu from around the world.

Coming up on Today's Gourmet.

(inspiring music) I am cooking around the world today.

In 25 minute we are going to go in Ireland doing an Irish stew.

After the first course we're going to do an avocado sauce, actually with a crab meat cake from the thousand part of the United States.

We are going to go to Mexico with more avocado and a guacamole.

And finally we'll finish in Portugal with fig stuffed with almond as they do in Portugal.

I like to cook that type of mixture and I think sometime it makes very interesting menu to work it out together.

Now we're going to start with the the lamb stew.

And as you see here I have a piece of lamb with a lot of fat on top that I'm going to remove.

This is from the back leg of the lamb.

You can use the shoulder, but the back leg is going to be munch trimer than the the front shoulder.

This is actually the large muscle of the back leg, what we call the top round.

You know, it's a nice piece of meat that you can roast with as well as do a stew with it, you know, but notice that I'm moving all of the fat out of it or as much as the surface of the fat and that very important in the type of cooking that we do and you really don't need it to be that rich anyway.

Now we are relatively doing small portion of meat here because we are doing a lot of vegetable with it.

I like to extend the meat with a lot of vegetables.

Here is not real special technique to remove the fat.

Just look at it.

And in a large muscle like this, the fat is really in the surface of the meat.

So you just cut it off.

Actually I will trim it exactly in the same way.

If I wanted to roast it, I could make some hole and put garlic in it in the oven.

That'd be great.

For our stew here, we are cutting it.

And when you cut the meat, you know if you start cutting somewhere, you will see that the meat usually separate by itself because there is theory of muscle as you can see here.

And between those muscle, you're going to have pieces, of fat or sinew that you may want to remove.

Actually the part of the meat that I am cutting now, that part here, it's part of the bottom round also, you know, all of those are part of the back leg.

I like to do the stew in fairly large pieces like this because I feel that when you do them in small pieces, by the time they cook they reduce again by like half or two third and people think that you've using some type of small trimming, you know, or scrap of meat.

So I like large piece in my stew.

Again, trimming it good this way.

This is spring lamb so called, you know, which indicate an animal between about six to 10 months old.

This is a domestic lamb, you know, I can see at the color of it, the smell of it.

It's paled in color, it has a nice smell as opposed to a New Zealand or Australian lamb, which would tend to be stronger in taste, you know.

So what we are going to do is to put this in there, and we go now to our vegetable.

This is a lamb stew, but it is polished with liquid and vegetable rather than fried or sauteed.

And the vegetable that we have, as you can see here, we have a whole bunch of different vegetable and what we do with it, I have more.

I have carrot, celery, potato.

Now you take your potato like that, you peel them, cut them into large piece, each of those, you cut them into chunk and now those chunk of potato, you trim them all I have done here already.

What you're trying to do is to do like a little round potato there.

I have some cooked already for you.

I'm going to go through the process explaining to you.

You see this way, that's what I have here.

Now we keep the trimming as well as the potato.

We do a little bit the same thing with the celery, you know.

You have celery here.

So you cut your celery into pieces like this into stick and the trimming, if you have pieces which are a bit off for the end, for example, this and all this, all that you put in your trimming so you don't lose anything.

Now the trimming that I have here of your potato, I have some onion, I have garlic, I have thyme, I have bay leaf and the the celery, all of that goes into, well I don't need all of those but this, a couple of bay leaf in there and basically all of the rest of it is going to go in there.

The garlic, the onion, celery pieces and trimming of potato, that's it.

All of that is going to be used as a thickening agent in the stock later on.

So, the next thing that we do is to cook those vegetable that is the nice piece of celery.

I put those potato in like two three cup of water, no salt, nothing.

You boil them for about 15, 20 minutes until they are just about tender slightly underneath, underdone.

You remove the potato with assorted spoon and you put your celery and your carrot, which is what I have now.

So the celery and the carrot, I am going to strain them.

You can use the lid like that.

I need the juice of the vegetable there.

You see what I'm doing actually I'm not losing anything.

All of the vitamin, all of the taste, all of the, you know the fiber and all that that you may have in the water, you use it in your stew.

This is what you start cooking.

That will go back into the stew later on and those trimming will be pushed through a food meal to thicken the sauce.

So that can go on the side.

Now in addition to this here I need a bit more seasoning and the seasoning that I have is, I can see it here, worthier sauce, a little bit of salt, pepper, (pepper grinder crunching) freshly ground pepper, that's it.

Put a lid on top of that, bring that to a boil and after it boil, this should cook for about 45 minutes.

And that would be just about right time at which we'll remove the meat and strain the whole mixture to create a sauce.

And while this is cooking, we are going to move to the second recipe, which today the crab meat cake, Crab meat cake in the style of the southern state.

And I have here everything that I need for my crab meat cake.

Now you may have seen on the market in the last few years that imitation crab meat, which is called surimi and the surimi actually the very old Japanese technique of making a type of patty a different type of shellfish out of mostly fish.

This mostly is made with pollock and cod though there are very abundant fish of which they make those things.

To call it surimi of crab for example, they have to have a approximately 25% of the crab itself in it and sometime even the shell of the crab is pulverize in it to do that.

So this has less cholesterol than regular crab.

And if you're interested in this then you may consider that it is good to do it this way.

What I have here is regular crab.

So this is the regular crab meat little pieces that you can buy this way the meat and into this we have some chives and some fresh some thyme leaf and chive, a little bit of mayonnaise in there that we put to bind it together.

A dash of pepper- (pepper grinder cracking) in it, actually quite a lot of pepper.

I like it nice and peppery and I'll make that first.

See I have just enough binding agent to make that crab all together, but I don't have to have munch anything else because I wanted as much crab as possible.

Finally at the end I put a bit of fresh breadcrumb.

I have about one slice of bread here, which is put in the food processor and transform into breadcrumb.

You know I put my pot to cook that with it, just mold it.

You don't want to work your bread too much because you want it to be nice and tender.

You know if you work your bread too much into it, you end up with a mess, it get too gooey, you know, and elastic.

And I would like to have it this way.

So here, you know, you press it together, we'll serve one crab like that per person.

They are barely holding together and that's exactly what you want.

So we put a little bit of peanut oil in there to saute this and this will have to saute a couple of minute on each side.

I mean we have enough for four crab here.

Maybe I'll do three crab that I'm going to put gently in there to start frying.

They will cook as I say, approximately three minute on each side, you know, all set.

And while the crab is cooking we are going to do a sauce for it and the sauce is going to be made with avocado.

Now of course if you are on a diet or if you want to reduce your calorie intake, maybe you should emit the sauce, you know, or maybe you avoid the avocado in the sauce because the avocado is fairly caloric.

I mean it is good, it has fiber but it is caloric also.

In any case, we are going to do the little avocado sauce.

Those are small, about five ounce avocado.

And the idea is to cut them this way all around.

Then you can twist your avocado and to remove the pit, just bang it with your knife, you can twist and this will come out of it.

And what I do now, and do it gently in your hand with the point of a knife.

I will cut this about a quarter of an inch that this is very tender, you know, so you don't have to worry too much about it and across, don't go through it because you would want to cut your finger, if you're afraid, put a towel underneath, you know, I do the same thing with the second one across again.

And now all I have to do is to take a spoon and dish this in there.

It's already all cut into dice.

You see I have maybe a bit too much here.

That will be enough.

I have some tomato with it.

Those tomato I dipped in boiling water.

So now I can cut it in half, press the seed out of it, we're going to chop the tomato, we'll add it to our sauce, shop coursely, and of course that sauce is very good with a poached fish for example, go very well with it.

Maybe that amount is enough.

(knife chopping) We'll put that right with the avocado.

And now it's about time for me to turn my cake on nice and brown on the other side, that takes about two, three minutes.

(pan sizzling) And with this red wine vinegar, quite a lot of red wine vinegar I put in it, maybe a dash of salt, a bit of peanut oil.

I like peanut oil in this, you know, in this you mix it and your sauce is done.

Just have to dish it on your plate and serve your crab meat cake with it.

Now with the rest of the avocado, I have another one here.

I can show you a little bit how we do the guacamole, you know, and it's very simple to make and quite delicious.

What you do, you just dish and be sure that your avocado is ripe.

You know, you could cut it the same way that I did the other again and now you crush it with a fork this way.

I like it very coarse like this, you know.

And into this, with my avocado, I have here a lot of seasoning.

Can put a bit of tomato also in it for color, here, yeah.

And on top of this red onion, a bit of jalapeno peppers, a bit of garlic, some chopped scallion lime juice and that's about it.

You put it together, salt, a bit of salt with it and you have a nice avocado.

They always say to leave the pit of the avocado in the mixture like this, you know if you want to keep it for a while to prevent discoloration.

Now what do you eat with your guacamole?

You eat that with with the chip make with the tortilla here.

And I have different type of tortilla, the flour tortilla, whole wheat tortilla.

And here I have corn tortilla.

Usually they are deep fried for us to cut down on the fat a little bit, all I do is to take a brush and I brush the tortilla with a little bit of oil on each side, cut it into wedge and put it in the in the oven.

Seven, eight minutes on each side.

It brown nicely and I don't have too much fat in it.

So that's a nice way of doing it.

Your avocado can be served in something like that.

It look good.

This is a great first course or rather snack, you know that you can serve this way.

And I think now we are about ready to serve the cake.

So I want to put a little bit of the avocado, sauce directly on the plate here with the tomato and you would want to serve that.

Put them around, and your crab meat cake right in the center of it.

And as I say, you know again if you want to cut down then you may want to emit the avocado sauce.

Just simply a delicious dish.

You know, people don't realize how important equipment is.

You know, if you wanna become a good cook, invest some money and buy the best equipment on the market.

You know, it does make a big difference.

I have different type of metal here.

Copper especially copper lineup with stainless steel is the best.

It does three times triple the amount of heat transfer than the second one, which is aluminum here.

Now this is anodized aluminum.

There is a coating on top of it which eventually disappeared.

This is plain stainless steel.

If the stainless steel is too thin, the heat transfer go right through and on the other side you have a black spot, no diffusion throughout the metal in decreasing order, you have the thick cast iron.

You cannot become emotionally attached to those.

You know I have some and other are good too, but they tend to discolor the food and so forth.

And here I have animal steel that's quite good too, but the heat transfer is not as good as you will have with the copper.

And finally what is with a great deal today is the non stick pan.

This is a regular north stick pan, which is eventually wear off and this is a permanent non stick, which is a guaranteed for a year.

If you get into baking now, then you use aluminum.

Aluminum will give you the heat transfer and the nicest browning, you know on your cake.

It's going to be nicer than steel or the larger tin, you know.

And so make yourself a favor, buy good equipment.

And now I better go back to my stew and know whether it's cooked.

We have that lamb stew here, which has been cooking for 45 minutes.

What you want do with it now is to remove the meat that I have here, which is about cooked now.

The rest of the vegetable, remember we are going to put it directly into the food, the food mill, you know, and this is why you use a food mill.

A food processor will work up to a certain extent.

But remember that here I have bay leaf for example thyme, I may have you know, clove sometime I leave the shell of the the clove of garlic in it, and then you put it in the food mill, which is better with the rest of the liquid.

Remember that that liquid, what the liquid of our vegetable that we did.

So we have all of the taste and nutrients into this.

So that goes into our food mill.

You want to clean it up pretty good because you wanna put back the meat into it there back on your stove and your meat back into it.

And now we want to strain this, make a puree, you know.

So actually you're using a little streaming of thickening agent, you know, and it's a technique which sometime, I mean this is an Irish lamb stew.

We used to do that recipe in Paris when I worked there.

And but the recipe or the technique rather sometime people call it a couli, you know when you have like a raspberry and you do a puree with the raspberry and use the flesh of the raspberry as a thickening agent you see that you have in there now and it's nice and rich.

Remember all of our vegetable which were there, we put them now down into the stew and you see you have about the right amount of liquid and so forth.

Put back the lid on top of it and you want to bring that to a boil and boil that for like 10 minute, 10, 15 minute now so that the whole thing simmer together.

And while it's cooking again we are going to do our dessert.

And for that we are moving up to Portugal, you know, where they do that recipe that I had last year with my wife, I really loved it and I decided to do it.

And we do it at home very often now.

It's quite easy to do.

We have those dry fig here and almond, and what you do, you cut the fig in like a flower, you know in fourths like this, you know, and you press it, you can press it on a cookie sheet directly like that.

We're doing a sandwich actually with two fig, you know.

So one this way, after you press it, turn it back on the other side you do the same thing with the second fig.

But what you should do there, those are mission fig, you know, try to get the largest one you can, you know it's better.

Again, this one I press it so that makes it a bit flatter.

And in the middle of the corner at the corner here we putting four almond, you know that you put there, those almond are not roasted, you know just play an almond this way, place that on top of it and press it into a sandwich now and that goes into the oven.

I think there in Portugal the little farmer put it in the sun, you know to dry.

But there it's good in the oven because the almond will roast and it'll take 20, 25 minutes in the oven.

When we were in Portugal at the market, people had big bag of that that they sold and it was terrific.

I have some which are cooked right here and as you can see they dry out.

Now you can do that, do them ahead.

The kids absolutely adore those things, you know, so you do them, it's very high fiber, the nuts are good for you.

So it's a terrific kind of snack dessert.

And now we're going to finish our stew, which has been reboiling a little bit.

So a bit of parsley on top of it.

And the stew, that type of meal, you know is served in a large container like that.

I like to serve it this way, you know, so I can dish it out or actually pour the whole thing into a large type of stew tearing actually, you know, I like the way it falls down very often in a natural way like this, you know, without fussing around too much with it, I think there is too much fussing around with the, with food now it fall in a natural way.

You cover that with a little bit of a herb that's parsley, you know, you can use whatever you want.

And here from Portugal, we are back into Ireland.

And now we have finished our tour culinare around the world and it's time to enjoy the food and bring in here the Irish lamb stew that we add and that we are going to enjoy.

And of course to recap the whole menu, we have here the guacamole.

Remember in our guacamole we put some cilantro, which is also called the coriander that I may have forgotten to tell you.

And I have those chip that I made with a little bit of brushing oil on top to avoid now the whole meal itself, is under 900 calorie.

And of course if you want to omit the sauce for the first course there, you're going to lower a great deal, again, your calorie intake through the fat that we have here, that little crab cake from southern United States is one of my favorite.

And now I say here and not only is it done with avocado, but the tomato if you want omit the avocado, just leave the tomato and maybe a little bit of green and it'll be just as good.

Be terrific with that.

We have again our lamb stew with a great amount of fiber because we have so much vegetable in it so we can lower the proportion of meat to have, it's very fresh and nice.

We have used not only the trimming for the sauce but the turn vegetable at the garnish and it's a great way of doing it.

You can also do your stew ahead.

So that's very nice.

You know, you are always looking to have some dish that can be prepared ahead and reheated when the guests come or when the family arrive, you know, so that's great.

And we have a salad with it.

I always love to have a salad.

Again, more fiber in your menu.

And finally those fig that I call Fig Villa Mora because that little town in the south part of Portugal, I was in vacation with my wife, that's where we enjoy those fig from at the market, hanging it in little bag.

I mean you had the farmer which would brought it for us and we really enjoy them so much that we decide to duplicate them for you.

Well, with this we have an interesting wine, actually.

This is a wine from Chile, another part of the world.

There is some great wine in Chile now, especially in the red, with are very fruity, well-built wines so you can enjoy those.

They are quite inexpensive wine.

I hope you're going to do our menu for today.

I enjoy making it for you, happy cooking.