- A great recipe that my father used to make.

When the cherries are in season, you pick them with the stem, cut the stem, a piece of it, put it in a jar.

If you remove the stem, they get mushy inside.

Fill your jar up with sugar or Karo syrup here, and the highest vodka that you can get.

About six, eight weeks later, it's this way.

And then it's a real treat to taste.

A taste of summer to enjoy all year.

It's a classic burgundy finally to a meal.

I'm Jacques Pepin, this is fast food my way.

Happy cooking.

Apple, beautiful apple.

Apple is full for me and I go to a place where I have 25 different type of apples and I do a lot of different dessert with it.

And that's what we're going to do today.

We're doing a nice little menu starting with a small crock of shrimp, shrimp with the shell in a hot vegetable broth.

And then after a little medallion of pork from the tenderloin in a sauce made with pomegranate juice and then spinach saute with macadamia nuts and resins.

And finally the apple with a butter pecan ice cream underneath or another type of ice cream.

And I will start with this.

I have a couple of tablespoon of butter in there and with this I'm going to cut.

I have two apple here and this is the third one.

And I like to peel my apple with a knife using the point of the knife and my thumb, you put in that hole here to prevent the knife from getting into your hand.

If you don't have your thumb here that tend to go there.

So you have to be careful.

Look, you can do it with a vegetable pillar as well and it's perfectly fine, but I'm used to doing it this way.

And then after started peeling the apple, notice that I move in small stroke here.

I push the apple with my right hand.

I'm right-handed and actually the left hand is pushing the apple into the knife quite a lot.

You could also do that.

The third actually without peeling the apple, now we carry it in half.

So it's been clean here and there.

And the same technique here again, I go in the center to remove the seed.

The seed is what we call the pepin in France, which is my name.

So I am a seed or a pepin.

And here we go.

You can dry with apple skin.

You know my grandmother used to say that it's very good for your kidney.

Make a tea with apple skin that you dry in the oven.

So here we cut that into, you know, large chunk like that, I mean good inches and so forth.

And we start cooking that in the butter.

And with this we're going to put maple syrup.

So the maple syrup is there and I will use half a cup of maple syrup.

This is a cup, eight ounce.

So that's about it.

And with this I'm going to cover it for a couple of minutes.

And the reason is that covering it, Will develop a little bit of steam.

The liquid comes out of the apple, the steam and it gets soft.

And that's what I want.

Then we remove the lid, cook it on high heat so that it reduce and start caramelizing.

Okay, next dish is the first dish of the menu.

I have two cup of water in there.

Then I'm going to put on high heat.

I wanna bring them to a boil.

And what I do there is really a vegetable broth.

And the vegetable broth, I'm going to put some onion in there and about about a third of a cup of onion, you know, something like this.

Celery, about the same amount of celery.

And notice that I use even the leaves, the leaves of the celery, it's fine.

Leek, so here is a leek.

I have beautiful leek in my garden Now that thick, you know, which I keep off of the winter.

The only thing that you discard is really this.

Now I start cleaning it around and you see I just don't cut all the green.

I cut the green.

As I get into the leak, I go higher and higher just to step to the light green color.

Then you turn it upside down and you split it open.

Now that open your leek and that's where you have your dirt and all that.

You can see that and you wanna wash this out.

That's how you do it.

So here is my leek.

There is no nothing to replace leek.

Same family then the onion, shallot, tuber, the leek got that specific taste.

Okay, so here I will use about again, a third of a cup.

That's it.

That's all my vegetables.

The water is already boiling, but if we put it in there, you could put fennel in there, you could put thyme belly, you could put Oregano.

I mean anything that you would want to do.

And I want a hot broth.

So for the hot broth, I'm going to put a little bit of those red chili flake.

And you want to be, you want to be parsimonious with it if you want or you wanna be generous.

If you like it really hot, then I need some salt.

I will cover it and boil it 1, 2, 3 minute.

Then we add the shrimp.

Let's see what's going on here.

You can see that the apple are relatively tender.

Now if I feel that they are tender enough, I wanna reduce now all that juice.

So I leave that on top of the stove and let it boil.

So I don't need the lid anymore.

So the shrimp for that, I have shrimp right here.

I want the shell to stay with the shrimp and just suck them and pull them out of the table at the table because I feel that cook with the shrimp, with the shell rather, the shrimp will be much more flavorful.

In any case, this is now boiling very nicely, very flavorful.

I have to put a little bit of red wine vinegar here to give some acidity.

Like one well about one, a good one, one and a half table spoon.

What I need also is to put some parsley in it.

I have some, this is the flat, the flat, so-called flat leaf parsley.

And what I would want to do is to take a handful of this and just put it in there.

Also just the leave hole.

That's fine.

And I'm gonna put the shrimp in it.

And what happen is that what you want to do here, you really want to push it in the stock as you see how soon as it touch the stock, it'll start changing color and get red.

Now with the shrimp in it, all I want to do is to bring it to a strong boil and when it boil, I shut it off and I leave it right there to cool off or get less hot into that liquid because I wanna serve that you can serve that cold.

But I like it kind of room temperature.

All around it's boiling pretty nicely now and I think frankly that this is enough actually.

So I'm going to shut it off at that point here and move on to the next dish.

And the next dish, it actually those little filler of pork that you can get on the market.

And those are really inexpensive, very lean.

You know, I've read somewhere that the amount of fat that you have in those is about like chicken.

There is a silver skin that I remove plus this one underneath that I'm going to remove with my knife.

It's kind of thick, you know, and you remove it in that manner.

This, because this is kind of tough.

You know what we call the medallion, those little pieces like this and two poor person like that frankly is plenty.

I have 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

The last one is always you cook it like this because the tail is is flatter.

That's it.

A bit of salt on each side, bit of pepper, freshly ground pepper.

Always good to ground your pepper just before the time you're going to use it.

And then we started the thickness of this, which is a good inch.

A good inch I would say is going to take minute and a half on each side.

Remember you don't want to really overcook that, you don't want to undercook it either, but okay, and check on my shrimp.

Yeah, they're doing well.

Rinse my finger again and now I'm ready to do the sauce for the shrimp while this is cooking.

Yeah, this is perfect.

You can see that the apple here, all of the outside of the apple there is large bubble, almost like a caramel you know there.

And that's what you want.

The apple are still white but you will see that on the outside.

It'll start picking up color.

So I'll cook it three, four minute now to caramelize it and then we'll add some apple juice to it to finish it up, cook it a bit longer.

So the sauce we're going to do for this is relatively simple.

The same type of sauce you do for shrimp or oyster, you know, that is, I'm using ketchup here.

Okay, a bit of ketchup, a bit of Tabasco, lemon juice, you want a lot of juice out of your lemon, you rub it to crack the the fiber or then you drop it in boiling water for 10, 15 seconds or then you put it in the microwave oven for like 15 seconds or so and it soften it.

Okay this and radish in that case here I use a regular bottled horseradish.

I can stir it and that sauce is fine.

For the shrimp It'll be terrific.

The second sauce, it's fun to make a couple of sauce.

It's going to be sour cream again with a bit of lemon juice, a dash of salt put on it.

Well maybe I put a dash of Tabasco as well and some horseradish.

I can also have that fresh horseradish, you know it come in the root, I peel it here and you can use one of those, one of those graters, you know, to put it on top, what they call those plain graters, which work absolutely wonderfully.

Oh boy, this is strong.

We can make this in there.

We check this.

You can see that it's browning now nicely.

I want to let it brown a little more.

The second sauce is ready.

And now I want to turn the pork.

You can see now that it's been cooking for a little while and minute and a half it's about ready and start the other dish, which is my spinach here.

So here we are, Cantu, it's nice and brown, beautifully.

With the spinach I'm going to start with those nuts.

Of course those are macadamia nuts, which I love.

You could use the almond of course or walnut or other thing, but we want to sort that a little bit.

Okay, I let that brown a second.

It shouldn't take long and I have raisins with that, that I'm going to put in it and baby spinach, I mean you can have the baby spinach or other type of spinach but those are really terrific, you know, so tender and all that.

If you have the big one, make sure most of the time you have to remove the the rib, you know, because the rib is going to be a bit too tough for that.

So let's cook that another couple of minutes and I'll check back my ah here is you can see the caramelization around here.

It's quite darker now.

So now we can put apple juice like half a cup, a good alpha cup of apple juice and I will cook that a couple of minutes, not until it reduce completely, I still want a little bit of sauces to serve with my ice cream.

Meanwhile I think that I'm going to remove those little filet here.

Now you see what happened is that especially if you do it a little more ahead than what I'm doing, you would want to remove it and keep it into a 140, 150 degree oven and keep it warm there or there if you're going to serve it pretty fast.

So in there we're going to deglaze that with pomegranate juice.

So it's sweet and it's sour at the same time it's gonna work out well.

And chicken stock add a good chicken stock here.

Yeah, basically no salt in it.

Now I wanna bring that to a boil and boil that for two three minute until it reduce.

And then we'll continue by putting grapes in it to the seedless grape and dry dry cherries.

You could have dry cranberry, dry cherries, any of those and finish up the sauce with a little bit of ketchup to thicken it at the end.

And finally, a little bit of arugula on top.

So let's see, this is browning and I think it's about enough.

So I'm going to put the spinach in there and saute the nuts.

So they are on top of the spinach so they don't burn underneath.

Here it is, that's going to go down a great deal.

So I put salt in it, pepper and then some raisins.

We're putting a lot of dry fruit in the food today.

Here it is.

The rest of the spinach the are going to render a fair amount of water, you know, after a while.

But I mean this is the type of dish still that you do at the last moment and this I wanna cover them.

Good, okay, on this side now.

I think that my apple, I could remove that apple now.

As you can see there is still some juice there, but it's perfectly fine because I will knead some of that juice.

So here it is.

You know, you could serve that by itself.

You don't even have to have an ice cream with it.

That's great.

And then let it cool off.

Probably would cover it.

When I cover something like that, I often like to cover it inside, you know, the really cool of inside.

So there is no air between the food itself and the thing.

And that's going to go into the refrigerator.

You see the reduction here is about right and this is the time then to put the grapes in It to put dry cherries or dry cranberry would be very fine with it too.

Cook it a couple of minutes and we add maybe a tablespoon or two again of ketchup in that case to give me a bit of thickening agent.

That's it.

So this, I want to boil a minute or two and that's going to be finished.

The juice which comes in this will of course go back into the sauce and I think this is good enough, I'm going to shut it off and I think we can serve this now that is the shrimp in the little crock.

So they've come to a boil, as I said, and they stand there.

This is a beautiful dish to serve, you know, a little bit in the style of clam bake and all of that or think the shrimp that you served in New Orleans and, but those are the shrimp.

But what I like is the beautiful vegetable broth that we have in there.

I'm putting four of those per person, which I think is the it about the recipe.

I have the parsley that we see here.

This one is kind of extra.

This maybe another one on top of this.

And of course the broth.

The broth is very spicy there and quite delicious.

So, you know, tell your guest, you absolutely have to drink that broth or dip bread and butter in it.

Okay, here we are and the sauces with this, I'm gonna put this here, are very straightforward sauces, starting with the red one.

With this and the white one with the whole reddish again and the sour cream.

I can hear the pork sizzling over there, meaning that it's ready.

This, I like to serve when it's kind of a room temperature.

I don't like it ice cold.

I think it's much better at room temperature, bread, butter with it, you have to have.

And let's see here, yeah, this is cooked enough, reduced enough, that is, I'm going to show off.

And see the grape are cooked enough but not enough to kinda burst up.

And then those of course are seedless grape and that's it.

You're ready to plate it.

Of course, in a case like this, you do all of your dish one after the other.

But at home you could really do that.

As I say, a few minutes ahead and keep that into a warm oven, but you don't really want to ever cook.

Remember there is no fat there.

That filet is really lean.

Any extra sauce is going to go there.

So the grape is quite a lot of garnish of grapes around.

Plus of course the dry, the dry sherry.

There we are.

And this is a beautiful, rich color, you know, so I have arugula, you don't really have to put the rug if you want, but I thought that the kind of a bit garlicy and pungent taste of arugula, you know, goes well with it.

So put a little bit and you can serve a little bit on the side even for your guest.

Now let's see where we are here.

The spinach are cooked.

As you can see, there is basically no liquid left because they do render a lot of liquid.

Here is a spinach the nuts are really crunchy on top and this is a great dish to serve with game.

Like if you do a venison or thing like that, I think that'd be great with it.

That's on top.

And here we are ready for the dining room.

I have the spinach here and the little pork tenderloin with the grapes.

And of course the dry sherry is on top.

My menu is basically finished except for the dessert.

In that case here you can put your ice cream underneath your fruit on top or sometimes I put the fruit in the bottom and the ice cream on top.

One but, okay that should be more than enough, let's say a little bit of that apple.

Now you can see it's caramelized and the juice is not as liquid as it was to start with, you know, so we put that underneath, top, try not to mess up the glass too much.

And then I like maybe a little bit of, I have some beautiful pistachio here a few of them will look very good on top.

You can put them whole, if you wanna crush them, you can use one of those or the back of a skillet crush them a little bit, but it's not absolutely necessary.

And that's how I would serve it.

If you want to splurge even more so.

You could replace the, you could replace the nuts with a little bit of little trifle of chocolate, you know, chocolate goes so well with.

And you can get those, you know, in the market now though, they are kind of ganache to a mixture of chocolate sometime with cream, close to a fudge, you know, and that's really good and very easy to use.

Now with this, I think that I'm going to have a little bit of Amontillado and this is a sherry, a sherry fino from Spain.

It's very dry too and be perfect with that, actually you could even have it with the rest of the meal, but I probably would get a red wine with that.

It was a great pleasure cooking for you.

I hope you're going to do it for your friends.

Thank you for watching and happy cooking.