- My supermarket makes a great rotisserie chicken.

When I'm in a hurry, I get one home still warm coming from work, I arrange it, cut it with the shear onto a beautiful salad like that.

Then I melt some herbs and garlic and parsley and shallot in there.

Put it with the juice of your chicken.

You put that right on top of it.

Now it becomes your own chicken, chicken persillade.

Make the supermarket work for you.

I'm Jacques Pepin.

This is Fast Food My Way.

Happy cooking.

You know when you shop, don't be afraid to substitute different cut of meat or type of grain in recipe.

For example, I found the veal slightly expensive.

So I use turkey breast to make my scallopini with morel.

But first we start with an allocan salad, Middle Eastern couscous with saffron.

This is a large grain to accompany the scallopini with morel.

And we end with a skillet apple charlotte, which I'm doing now.

I have three beautiful apple, about half a pound each.

Give me about a pound and a half.

I'm putting this in a skillet, a small skillet because they're going to kind of go down and I will put a couple of pieces of butter in there, a couple of tablespoon of butter.

That's it.

Then I'm putting maple syrup with it and a little bit of honey.

All of that liquid has to come to a boil and you want to cover it so it soften a little bit and cook it four, five minutes until it's soft.

And we remove the lid, cook it without the lid to caramelize it.

Okay, the salad we're going to have here is with a little sauce, very easy.

I'm going to take some mayonnaise.

I have plenty here.

Mustard, french mustard, a dash of a good red wine vinegar.

It won't be enough to liquefy it.

So I'm adding a little bit of water.

You want it nice and smooth.

Taste it, in there I would probably put a fair amount of cracked pepper.

Good.

And maybe, well, maybe a dash of salt.

That's it.

I'm also going to put scallion in there or rather a chive.

You could actually put scallion.

I think the chives are going to be better here.

Give me a nice green color.

Okay, now all of a sudden it is not a jar of mayonnaise anymore.

It's something really special.

Here we are.

Good.

Now I have the tomato.

I'm going to serve half of a tomato per person like this.

We can cut that in this way.

Maybe I'll do it a bit differently to the, maybe I'll do it this way and this way.

Cut the eggs in half, cut that in half again.

I mean, this is really tomato and eggs, but you make it look a little different when you insert it in here, here.

Or you can do it simply in the center like this as we do.

You know, to serve your salad this way or with another little wedge here.

Just make it complicated.

Right, okay.

Then you have that egg leftover, I mean, that little piece that you can put around and we can present it this way.

Let me check on this.

Now I can see it's really boiling and I have a lot of liquid in see, you see?

Now what you do next, you check if it tender, well not quite, but probably enough so that by the time it finish boiling down here, it'll again tenderize.

And when it's totally boiled down, then it's going to start caramelizing.

And that's what I want.

So now you cook it on top of the stove and it'll take from three to five, seven minutes.

It depend entirely on the amount of moisture that you have there.

Okay, here is my eggs.

Spread it out a little bit.

You can move it this way as well, you know?

Now we have anchovy fillet.

We'll put anchovy fillet on the outside.

If you decide not to put anchovy fillet, it's fine.

Some people find the anchovy fillet pretty assertive.

I love anchovy fillet, so... Okay, we have our salad here.

The extra yolk can go on the side here and there.

I mean, I'm sure you can find other way of doing it.

Even a little more chive, maybe.

On top and around.

You know, sometime with the stun, you know to take the semi-ingredient you have, you are used to it, you know, a hard cooked egg, a tomato, and then do something a little bit different with it.

Now let's check on this.

You can see that there is still plenty, plenty juice.

So what I'm going to do is to cover this with bread.

So probably two slice like this, two slice like this, will probably cover this.

I mean, you can see, you can see the lid here.

It's about, it's about that size here.

So that should work.

I'm gonna cut the corner a little bit, the corner here and then you want to butter that bread.

You can see it's doing well.

It's starting to caramelize.

Now, there is basically no more liquid.

You see, no more liquid here.

This is very tender now and I have some caramelization going on.

So I can caramelize it a little more and then put it into the oven for about 10 minutes.

So that will brown the top and continue a bit of the caramelization underneath.

So first, I'm going to butter this piece of bread here.

Whoap.

Remember that the charlotte again, when you did charlotte, I did charlotte with Julia many times.

Julia loves charlotte and we cook the mixture of apple, sometime we put dry fruit in it as well.

And in those mixture then you unmold your charlotte later on.

But sometime it collapse, often it collapse.

This one will never collapse.

It's like a type of tarte tatin, you know, the upside on.

But then with a crust of bread, that's what I call it a charlotte.

Okay, let see again, now you can see the caramelization here and that's what you want.

Beautiful caramelized apple.

So you press them flat.

You can see that when I started I had a lot of apple and it seemed to be too big, but it does go down a great deal.

And this is an eight inch skillet.

So let's see here.

I put two of those there on my crust and wanna press it a little bit into it.

This is your crust and that's what you want to do is to put a little bit of sugar on top so that in the oven you're going to have, you know, the butter melting in the sugar can be bad.

Here it is.

So now that's ready.

Actually you could do that ahead.

You know, you can even prepare the bread.

Don't put it into the oven.

Put it at the last moment, well, then reheat it a little bit before you serve it.

This is good when it's look warm, you know?

Okay, so this will take 10, 12 minute.

And during that time we are going to start our Middle Eastern couscous and we do that with saffron.

And that couscous, as you can see, is different than other couscous.

It's a big round grain.

Sometime it's called Israeli couscous, sometime it's called Middle Eastern couscous.

But anyway, it is those large grain as opposed to the couscous itself, which is much finer.

Couscous look like, almost like semolina, you know?

So what we're going to do here is to serve that with pumpkin seed.

And of course I have beautiful saffron here.

And the saffron is the pistil of flowers.

And this is a very, very expensive type of seasoning.

You know, it takes 64,000 crocuses to make a pound of a saffron.

And the best one, is my opinion, come from Spain.

Some good one come from Iran, Iraq also, but I think the Spanish one is the best.

So a little bit of onion, maybe a third of a cup of, sort of a cup of onion here.

Okay.

Maybe a dash of olive oil in there.

Then the onion to brown, boy, I opened that can of, that can of saffron and I really can smell it.

Okay.

In this you can have those type of nuts or you can use other nuts or actually no nuts at all.

When I do those type of things, sometime I put figs as well.

You know what growth in the area I put in it.

So this, little pinch of saffron here.

Finally, the couscous, I have a cup here.

So stir it a little bit so that it is all coated with the oil.

There we are, dash, ah, good dash of salt, pepper and chicken stock here.

That's it.

Now you want to bring that to a boil, I stir it once here and that's it.

Bring it to a boil and cook it about 10 minutes.

And with that we are going to do scallopini with the morel.

And in that case with turkey.

So I have dry morel here, and right away that bring the level of your dish to a higher, more sophisticated because morel are very expensive.

Morel are absolutely wonderful dry.

In fact, I prefer dry morel than the fresh one.

Nine out of 10 time they have more taste.

So I put them with water in it and I put a piece of aluminum foil, which is pretty stiff.

So it push the morel and keep it under water to reconstitute the morel here.

You can see that.

And we'll keep them all, I mean, if there is some really large one, you may want to cut them in half.

Okay, we'll leave them on the side, the dry one there and my scallopini now.

I have another, I said, you know, the scallopini of veal are available, but can be very expensive.

When you go to the market, you know, in my market at least, sometime I have pieces of, this happen to be turkey about that size and they call it cutlet when it's thicker.

And then they call it scallopini when it's smaller.

It really doesn't matter, one or the other.

I have about four ounce of meat per person.

It could be two scallopini of two ounce each or one larger one.

You can also cut it yourself or butterfly it like this.

And then you can put it on the table with a little bit of water, if you want.

Or then with plastic wrap like this, you can put another piece of plastic wrap on top and use a bottom pan or something to pound it to wherever you want to pound.

On this side you have a tenderizer, you know, which is something else.

Okay, so here we are.

Those scallopini are going to be salt on each side.

And pepper, freshly ground pepper.

That's it.

This, you know, you don't want to overcook those or they will cook pretty fast, huh?

Couple of minutes on each side.

Okay, now we can drench them in a little bit of flour.

It give you, you know, a certain moisture on the top and a certain fill that you don't have if you don't do that.

So very gently, very gently and you pat the extra flour.

So it's very, very little flour.

Go in there.

Okay, one thing that you don't do and I see many people do, they prepare that ahead before they saute and then they leave that.

You cannot do that.

After five minutes the moisture from that meat will mix with the flour and you're going to have glue on top of it.

Okay, this.

So if you're like me and you like really the leg of the turkey and often I do that and I keep the breast and I do something else with the breast like this.

Okay, now into this we're going to put some shallots.

Cutting across again, this is about, well, about a third of a cup.

That would be good.

I'm gonna put them on top of this when they are finished.

Let's see on the other side, yeah, they are browning beautifully.

Here we're.

And you know you have about, as I said, four, four and a half ounces and that's plenty, especially with the sauce, you know?

So this one thing that of course we are going to use certainly is the juice.

The juice that is the water of, the water that the mushroom are soaked in it.

'Cause it has a lot of taste and we want to use that.

So I can check my couscous here, we can see there is basically no water left.

A little bit, close to 10 minutes.

I'm still going to leave it couple of minutes and then I will remove the lid and continue cooking it.

So this, it is cooked enough.

It is brown also on the other side.

Remember it makes a big difference also when you cook poultry, whether you have the skin on it or whether you don't have the skin on it.

If you don't have the skin it cook much, much faster.

So here in theory, I would keep that into an oven as I say, of about 130, 140 degree oven at the most.

Just what I'm finishing, finishing the sauce, you know, so this I will saute there and now I'm putting my mushroom in there.

Those mushroom are never, never overcooked, you know?

People think that mushroom overcooks, you can cook them a long time.

There is basically nothing in there but the water of soaking, I will put it very slowly and see at the end, if I feel there is a little bit of sand or residue, then you don't put it in.

Okay, and at that point this will stay on high heat to evaporate and reduce almost to a glass, what we call to a glass that is reducing it to the point where it is almost dry and then concentrated on taste.

And maybe during that time I'm gonna check my tart again.

Yeah, it's about fine.

It's about fine.

I can see my tart here.

You know, I want to press it.

I know that it's moving in the plate because if you do that and you can do that ahead and you can leave it on the table like a tarte tatin.

If you leave it on the table, it's going to caramelize in the bottom and get hard, it's fine.

Don't unmold it, that bread or the crust will get soggy.

So leave it like this when you're ready to use it, place the whole skillet on top of the stove and warm it up until you can move it like that in your plate before you unmold.

Look at that, the real tarte tatin.

Beautiful.

This is really hot.

On my top there.

Now I'm going to glaze the top a little bit with apricot and that apricot is an apricot jam.

But what I do, I put it into the microwave oven, you know, for about 30 or 40 seconds so that I glaze the top like this.

Here we are.

This is rich and nice, but as you can see with my four slice of bread.

Okay.

Now I could cut this.

I should have looked the direction of the bread where it was.

But should let it have a chance of resting a little bit.

But we, so here is my slice of... It is really more of a tarte tatin even than a charlotte, you know?

And to gild the lily, on top of this, this would be nice to have a little bit of a sour cream or ice cream on top.

That's it.

And even a little piece of tarragon, I love herb, why not?

And this is our skillet apple charlotte.

So let me check on this and you can see I come here just in time.

Basically all reduced and concentrated.

So it is time now for me to drizzle a little bit with white vermouth.

When I cook with Julia, we cook a lot with white vermouth.

This is cooked enough.

I'm going to remove this to see.

Yeah, that's it.

There is no more moisture so I'm going to shut it off too.

And then the cream, so you would serve here probably putting a third of a cup of cream or something like that should be enough.

Again, this has to come to a boil now and reduce.

Salt.

Pepper.

And you can even put a little bit of lemon juice here.

Now it's thickening nicely and we're ready to serve it.

Hmm, just like I did in apprenticeship, with tarragon on top.

My aunt would be proud of me.

Here it is, the scallopini with morel.

And let's see the couscous.

This is absolutely wonderful taste, that couscous.

The bottom is a bit stuck, but it's okay.

Okay, and this is the couscous with saffron.

Maybe a few more nuts on top of it never hurt.

And with this, you know, I have a beautiful pinot noir here from California.

And this is going to be the perfect finish to that splendid meal.

You know preparing a meal together, nourishes the heart, the soul, and the stomach.

Happy cooking.