- You know, when I'm pressed by time, I love to do that very simple first course which is aering in wine that you can buy at your supermarket.

I put that with a little bit of sour cream, some diced apple and diced cucumber, a little bit of Tabasco.

I always put a good dash of bottle of radish, a few capers.

You can put lemon juice as well.

You mix that thoroughly.

You have a beautiful first course if you place that right in the middle of a nice line, a glass lined up with beautiful salad like this.

And this is a wonderful first course in seconds.

I am Jacques Pepin and this is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking!

You know, keeping it simple doesn't mean that your menu lacks elegance.

This menu is perfect for entertaining and giving you some time with your guest.

And what I'm going to try with, I'm trying the sausage here, but the menu will start with gnocchi, potato gnocchi with eggs and truffle oil, pretty elegant.

Then, a skirt steak in the style of grandma, that is my mother-in-law and I am starting to saute the curly mustard green with hot sausage.

Here you can buy, of course, those sausage at the supermarket.

Make sure that you remove the skin around, I mean the casing usually is on it, and that you can do without.

Although sometime it come without the casing.

And then, you want to start sauteing this.

Those are hot Italian sausage, you know?

And I like it with the hot Italian sausage this way.

You can cut that actually in smaller pieces than I have, but it's fine this way as well.

We're gonna put some onion in there, a little bit of, you know, coarsely chopped onion.

There we are, you don't have to be that careful with this here.

Okay, that's gonna cook a couple of minutes.

I'm gonna cover it.

So that you want, of course, the sausage to be totally cooked, but of course, we're going to cook that with the mustard green.

I have mustard green here.

And you could do the same thing actually with cabbage, you could do that with kale, and you could even do that with different type of salad, certainly the escarole type of salad or even iceberg for that matter would work fine.

So this, of course, the stem sometime are a bit tough although these are pretty tender.

So maybe we can put those stem as well.

Just cut them coarsely this way.

And again, this is getting ready so it really doesn't take that long.

And while this is cooking a little more, I'm going to show you those steak here.

So those are what we call skirt steak.

While you go into the market, you will find those skirt steak.

But very often, what you find is not the skirt steak, it's in between the skin of the cover of a large piece of meat and they have those layer in between that they take out now and sell because it look this way, elongated like this and it look a bit this way and they sell it as skirt steak.

Unfortunately, they are far to be a standard of this.

The skirt steak is actually the diaphragm.

You know, inside the animal here, there is a diaphragm, two piece of meat very long like that, attached to the flank of the animal, which expand and contract the diaphragm.

And those two strip of meat are really very tender.

You can see that one side here is pretty fatty usually.

So you may want to remove some of the fat, here a little bit if you want.

But this is used, of course, in fajita, which is the classic way of using the skirt steak.

Okay, so we do steak of about five, six ounces here at the most.

I have four steak here, that's good.

And that you can prepare that and season them a little bit ahead.

Let me check on this.

I think my sausage are pretty nice and brown now.

So I'm going to put the mustard mustard green in it and this reduce a little bit.

So I pile it up on it.

If I just wash them, there is water in it.

This doesn't have too much water.

Maybe I put a little bit of moisture in it just to stop the process.

That's it.

That on top.

And now, salt and pepper on each side.

These, of course, often are grilled, you know?

But in that case, we're going to do a sauce with garlic and scallion.

So I do them in a skillet.

And what we want to put on top is a little bit of the rind of the lime that makes it like grandma used to do.

My wife Gloria was born in New York but her mother was Puerto Rican, her father Cuban.

So this is the way grandma used to do her steak.

So we like those flavor.

So the rind, this is a neat thing to do the rind.

And then, a little bit of the juice, I'm gonna put on top.

That's it.

So I'll take some of the oil from the anchovies here and maybe a dash extra olive oil.

Gonna put them on high.

I put salt and paper here.

So when it's ready, not quite.

I'll saute briefly.

And you can see that this is about half to three-quarter of an inch.

So it'll take like a minute, minute and a half on each side on really high.

Let's see this.

Yeah, now that's getting soft.

I forget whether I put salt in it.

No, I didn't.

So salt, always taste, pepper, another couple of minutes, its ready.

Now this is ready.

That's it.

Couple of minutes on each side and I'm going to change side because that stove goes faster than the other one, and this is about finished anyway.

So here, what we are going to serve it with is the garlic, scallion, and that's about it.

So the scallion, usually I cut the end of it and any damage leaves, you know?

Like at the end.

But otherwise, you should use all of the scallion.

And I think that two scallion, maybe three should be enough.

Let me see my steak now.

Good, so the scallion, I'll just coarsely chop.

There we are and garlic.

Garlic, crush it coarsely.

And then, we can rock it, really make a puree out of the garlic.

And actually, we're going to do the same thing with the anchovy fillet.

Here they are.

Chop them coarsely, put them with the garlic.

You see the kind of mixture that it often do with the garlic and anchovy fillet, very powerful, but it give you a very definite taste that I love.

Okay, I think my steak are maybe cooked enough now.

There we are.

Good, in there now we're going to put garlic anchovy fillet.

Remember, there is already the lime juice and lime rind on top of this.

So you have a lot of taste.

Okay, and now I want to deglaze that with a little bit of a chateau sink.

Water is one of the best way to deglaze.

You could put a bit of stock, put water just for the crystallization in there.

So I need three, four table spoon and that's about it.

Very simple and that's ready.

So as you see, you would want to cook that at the last moment because it really doesn't take very long to cook.

So let's see, we can see the bubbling here and the sides and you just have a little bit of juice.

So here is our mustard green that we can put in, I think that I'm gonna use this in that, big bowl of mustard green.

Last time I did that, actually I did it with escarole.

It was delicious and very classic, probably more in the Italian tradition, but here we are.

And then the steak, I will pick up this one maybe.

Make sure that you get all of your juice in there.

And the stack there will be slightly rare, which is the way I like it with this on top.

Hmm, you can see that here.

Where we to cut it, that is going to be nice and red which is the way you want your skirt steak grandma.

And now let's make the gnocchi with eggs and truffle oil.

And my market has gnocchi like this.

And I already have that in the cupboard when I'm ready to, you know, some people come unexpectedly, I say let's do gnocchi.

And in that case, I'm going to do it with eggs.

So those are potato gnocchi.

Should cook them in like one layer like this.

And they are already pre-cooked but still pretty tough.

So you want to moisturize them and put water.

So I'm going to put at least a cup of water in there and a little bit of olive oil.

And what you want to do is to cook this until there is no more liquid.

So it will have absorbed all of that liquid and it will get rehydrated and soft and the way it should be.

So I'm going to cover this, bring it to a boil and cook it.

It's gonna take about five, six minutes.

You can check to see whether there is any oil leftovers.

So we have scallion here at the garnish, okay?

Which we're going to coarsely chop.

This type of dish, you know, you could do that ahead, but you would finish it up with the egg just before you show your guest, you know?

And that wouldn't take more than two or three minutes.

So again, many of those dishes can be partially done.

Okay, here we are here.

I have eggs with this.

So maybe four, five eggs.

Notice that I always break my egg on something flat.

When you break it on something flat, you don't even see the opening here.

You put your thumb and you open it this way.

If you do it often on the side of a bowl like this, the shell goes inside and introduce bacteria and very often break the yolk as well.

So conventionally, it should be broken this way.

Small detail, you know?

But that's what make good cooking.

Okay, salt pepper in there.

But at the end, I'm going to put some sour cream as well here.

So I'll beat my eggs.

I love anything with eggs.

If I was on a deserted island, if you give me eggs, maybe potato and chicken, that's about all I need, you know?

So let's see this here.

Now it's boiling very nicely.

So again, keep it covered.

I'm going to have some truffle with this on top.

You don't have to have the truffle, but a friend of me brought me a truffle.

So those you can see, this one has been opened, it's kind of whitish inside.

And when the skin of the truffle is very rigorous, very rough like this one, it usually indicate the summer truffle, Tuber aestivum so called.

And they are beautiful.

They don't have that much taste, the summer truffle.

The best one that, of course, the winter truffle called Tuber brumale, and sometime Tuber melanosporum.

And I'm not even talking about the white truffle of pigment, which this one, Tuber magnatum, cost zillion of dollars, you know?

But this is nice, a little added touch.

Cut it with a vegetable pillow like that, in very thin strip we can put that on top.

And of course, we're going to have parmesan cheese as well.

So let's see where this is at.

You can see, I can see now that my gnocchi have not doubled in size but almost.

And you can check them out to see, here now they are tender, very tender.

So now I wouldn't even want to put the lid back on it.

We can finish cooking this way, and maybe a minute more.

And with this, you know?

I think that a little, what do I have here?

An Ana Verdelho.

Verdelho, it's a grape from Portugal theoretically and this one happened to be from Australia.

So it has the new screw cap, it's a bit green, it's a bit harsh.

That would go well with that type of dishes.

Smells good too.

Always taste the wine.

In addition to the truffle here, I have truffle oil and this is oil that you can buy now in most specialty market, which is infused with truffle or an essential oil of truffle.

I can hear now that it's sizzling, I think it's ready for the eggs.

Oh, I have to put my scallion first.

Scallion should cook a little bit in there.

Okay, no one will know that.

Put the eggs.

Here we are.

The pan that I have here is almost enough to finish, I mean the heat that I have in the pan is almost enough to finish the cooking of the eggs.

I'm gonna put a little piece of butter in there.

And there it is.

This is a kind of elegant first course, you know?

You know, I serve thing like that I call a brouillade from egg brouille.

And very often in France, we serve that on salad, like on a Boston lettuce.

This is cooked enough.

I want the eggs not to be too cooked.

And to stop the cooking even further, and a bit of enrichment, I'm putting a little bit of sour cream in there, okay, kind of decadent but good.

Okay, here we are.

Put my eggs here.

I'm sure you never had gnocchi this way.

I think the recipe is for four.

It could serve probably eight people.

Maybe put a little bit of the truffle on top of it.

Maybe I could have a little more green.

Put some scallion there on top and maybe a trickling of that very special oil.

And that's it.

You have that, you are in heaven, gnocchi with eggs and truffle oil.

What you can add on top of it, which I have here, is the parmesan cheese.

And you would put it at the last moment.

It's not absolutely necessary because I have a lot of taste in it, but it's still put another layer of flavor.

So a little bit of this, that's for me.

Okay, gnocchi with egg and truffle oil and Parmigiano Reggiano.

And now for the dessert, a chestnut cream Mont Blanc.

The Mont Blanc, of course, is the largest mountain of the Alp and a Mont Blanc had kind of a big thing with white on top.

That's why we're going to do some heavy cream here.

Just whip, you know, some whipped cream in there.

And the Mont Blanc is done also with chestnut puree.

So I'm gonna start beating that cream.

And as you see, with the cream is just a gentle motion back and forth, different than the egg white.

'Cause if you beat it too much, then your de dessert will taste slightly of butter rather than cream.

But this is beautiful now, so it takes a minute or so.

So what we have here is chestnut spread, which often came in smaller can than that, sometime in big can.

It's different than a planned period of chestnut because this one got sugar, it's got vanilla in it, and it's very sweet.

I put a little bit of dark rum in there.

Dark rum goes so well with this.

If you don't want to put it, it's fine.

If you don't wanna put alcohol in it, it's okay.

So this is a very rich cream.

I was a consultant working at The Russian Tea Room in New York and I remember doing what we call a turinois, which is a mixture of the chestnut, exactly this, with about the same amount of chocolate melted together and some vanilla, and butter and you put that into tearing mold.

Let it cool off and molded to slice it.

That was really good.

Okay, so you put a little bit of this, make the great elegant, especially around Christmas.

So there, chocolate that I say goes so well with it.

Break some biscotti in there.

You know, you can have the one with or without the chocolate, it's okay.

Or both for that matter, a little bit of both.

So I do those type of dessert often with this.

And you can even put a little bit of chocolate on top of it if you want.

I have some chocolate in my microwave oven here that I melted that the easiest way of doing it takes about a minute, takes about a minute or so, and you have your chocolate melted in there.

I could have a little trickle of the- Chocolate is not absolutely necessary, but that's really gilding the lily, as we say, okay this, and then I'll have my, you know, whipped cream on top.

You know, another thing that we use for holiday are those which are actually crystallized violet, you know?

And that's kind of classic in Christmas dessert, you know?

Very often to put a crystallized violet on top that I can put.

Or maybe a little spring of mint is just as good for a beautiful chestnut cream Mont Blanc.

That kind of dessert is very elegant using ready-made ingredient.

Very happy to do, I hope you do it, happy cooking.