- You know, one of the classic dish that we do is a mixture of pineapple and Kirschwasser, which is cherry brandy, a little bit of brown sugar here, and a nice sherbet, a raspberry sherbet.

In the middle of it, a spring of mint, a cookie, and you have a great dessert.

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

Happy cooking.

When I was a kid in France, my aunt used to do a dessert, which was a kind of mock tiramisu.

She used to do it with the Lulu, what they call the Lulu, which were any French kid will know that those are kind of butter cookie that we used.

So I'm doing a deed very similar to that.

Simple using lady finger more in the style of a tiramisu.

Those are both lady finger, and some are smaller, some are bigger depending where you buy them.

So you can have a couple of package and use whatever you need.

So what we'll do first, I have coffee here.

I'm gonna put a couple of tablespoon of rum in my coffee and a little bit of sugar, like a tablespoon or so, just to soften it a little bit, stir it.

This is my syrup.

The coffee is barely lukewarm, cool.

And then, you can pour that on top of it.

You want to soak your lady finger here.

And they do absorb quite a lot.

And the next things, I have some mascarpone cheese here or the mascarpone cream rather.

And the mascarpone, of course, is an Italian very rich cream.

You could use something else but this is quite nice.

And I'm mixing that with sour cream, half and half about, then about a good quarter of a cup of sugar, some vanilla teaspoon, teaspoon and a half of vanilla, and that would be the center of my cake.

So just mix it together, it's finished.

You can see the lady finger is very soft now, and there is no more moisture.

All of the coffee rum has been absorbed.

So this is it.

What we are going to do is to line that up inside.

Whoop, even if it break, doesn't make any difference because basically it's going to be covered.

And I'll put three, and then cut those in half.

It's not very important there.

What you want to do is really cover the whole base like this.

And then, put some of your cream on top.

About a third of it.

Then more lady finger, same quantity.

And finally, you put the last, you know, the last layer on top, and then the rest of my sour cream.

Use your rubber spatula, or another spatula.

That's it.

And then, we put the powdered chocolate on top of it here.

That's it.

You can use bitter chocolate here like I'm doing and it's sweet inside.

So that give it a contrast, you know?

I just clean up the edge.

Here we are.

And that's it.

Really take a few minutes to do, it's quite easy.

So what we're going to do is to cover it.

Otherwise, the chocolate as well as the sweet will pick up taste in the refrigerator, you know?

You cover it tight and now it has to be refrigerated.

And the second dish or the first dish of our menu today is going to be trout, a smoked trout with a special salad.

So while I have my smoked trout here, we're going to start with a salad.

And in my salad, I'm going to put chopped onion here, a bit of onion, about a third of a cup or so.

So I have my onion here, tomato, a cup of diced tomato, couple of different type of olives, cilantro, putting it the whole leaf like that.

It's fine in there, I love cilantro.

If you don't like cilantro, put parsley.

Put a bit of chives.

I'm gonna put some salt and pepper.

And finally, eggs.

And I have an egg cutter here.

And you see, you cut your egg this way to make slice and you can see that that eggs is beautifully yellow inside without any green around the yolk.

And I was very careful not to let it cook too long.

And when it's cooked to refresh it under cold water.

That's what take that green stuff out.

So you carry it one side, you twist it, and you carry the side.

We now have diced eggs, you know?

And that's very easy.

When I do an egg salad, that's always what I use.

It's much easier than cutting it with a knife, you know?

And what I have with that, simply some olive oil.

I really don't need any acid in there.

I think it's be milder just with a good extra virgin olive oil.

That's a great salad, beautiful color.

Okay, the second thing that I want to serve with that trout is a mixture of horseradish, and you can use cream cheese or even sour cream.

In that case, I'm using a soft cream cheese here.

And that mixture of sour cream and cream sauce goes extremely well with smoked fish as well as like boiled beef, that type of thing, that would work well with it.

Dash of salt, and of course, ground pepper in it.

No, I use trout here, but sometime I use white fish, actually whatever I can find in the market.

Even actually smoked bluefish is very good.

Okay, so here is my right mixture here.

Now the trout, you can see that those trouts, that's what they are at the market.

They are with the skin, except they have been boned out as you can see this.

Well if I could, I would've bought a trout which was not boned out.

Because in order to get the bone out of it here, they cut on each side of the filet.

And this is full of tiny bone which now have to be removed.

If I smoke a trout that I have done or buy a trout or a white fish unboned, you take the skin out of it like I'm going to do here.

And as you can see, the skin just comes out very easily, you know, from the bonefish.

Here it is.

And at that point, if that trout was whole, I would cut it in half here, the line, and I would pull this out out of the bone and all of the bone would stay right in the center.

In that case here, I bought boned out trout and I have to bone it out.

So as I said, you can see, you can feel it up if you go with your finger.

It's hard to see but if you go with your finger, you will feel that all around here, there is a line of bone.

So either you remove it, you know, with a tweezer, you know?

This way, which is really a pain in the neck, or you can cut the whole strip out.

And in our case here, we are going to use this.

As you can see, the bone has been removed here.

And what I would like to do when I do this is to break and try to keep the shape of the trout itself, you know?

I'll check it out, see if there is no bone in it.

At home when I do that, it's because my wife goes fishing or my friend John Claude go fishing, they get a lot of trout in spring, I smoke my own trout.

But this is, of course, much easier.

You get that at the market.

So to finish the dish, very simply, we're going to put our salad for one portion here.

When you want to do what I'm doing here, which is actually doing an edge of a salad.

I'm going to do an edge here.

Put everything in the middle, not around the edge.

And then, push it with your spoon to create an edge.

What I'm saying is that if you try to create the edge like that, you always messed up the thing.

So you put everything in the center and spread it out.

And here, we can put a nice leaves of lettuce in the center.

Now I'm putting my cream, you know, the cream for the trout and breaking my trout right in the center of it.

Trout is really good too with a nice, crunchy bread, butter, and that's great.

So this is a terrific first course.

You can take one of those olive, maybe put it in the center for color, and we can serve that with a nice, crunchy bread like this that goes well with it.

(gentle light piano music fades) And now for the main course, we're going to do a mixture of cauliflowers, I have cauliflowers here, and chicken.

You can see that cauliflowers is really hard.

There is no brown spot on top of it.

And that's what you want to look for.

And what we'll do here is to cut that part and the core.

When I do a soup, for example, and I would use practically all of that in my soup, especially if I'm going to do a like a vegetable soup that I'm going to do a puree with.

You can break this into your flowerette.

You see, when your cauliflowers is old, you can check it by going, and at the end, you're pulling out the skin.

Here is the skin, like you have in broccoli or right around the stem.

Now that skin here is very tender while an old one is kind of tough and strong in taste.

So if you have a null cauliflowers, you want to do something elegant, you remove that skin around.

I do the same thing with the broccoli.

With the broccoli, you have to do it.

So we cut that into flowerette.

I have salted water here which is boiling and I'm gonna put that to cook right in there, not on the stove.

This one is still big.

And this going to come back to a boil and will cook about five, six, seven minutes.

I like the vegetable cooked.

I like them a little bit al dente that is a little bit firm to the teeth but not raw, you know?

So there, I have another skillet and I'm going to do the chicken in it.

And that chicken here, I have four breast of chicken.

So remember when you remove the skin, particularly like here, I'm going to remove the skin, you can use a towel for this, it cook much faster without the skin.

Those breasts of chicken are about four ounces, maybe four, four and a half ounces.

Yes, and that's fine for one portion.

So what we'll do there is putting a couple of tablespoon, ooh!

That's a little bit hot.

So just a little film, actually a little film of water in the bottom, a good tablespoon of butter in the middle of this, and that's going to create a stock for us to poach this in.

So we call that cree en blanc, cooking in white.

That is it doesn't pick up any color.

By the time it finished cooking, that liquid will have basically evaporated.

There is a little bit left, we use it in the juice.

So here, let me put salt on top of this on each side, as well as freshly ground pepper here, that's it.

And I put that directly to poach.

I'm going to lower the heat.

I don't want it to boil too fast, but to poach gently about four, five minutes for that size.

We have to rinse our finger after the chicken.

Let me check on this also.

It will take three, four more minutes to cook and I'm going to do a sauce to serve with it.

And what I use very often at home, I buy red salsa in the supermarket.

You can buy it fresh or you can buy it sometime in jar, even sometime in can.

Actually, the one in jar like this is kind of dark and pretty strong, and well, not very appetizing.

So I like to do the fresh one and I can keep it for a couple of weeks and it's very easy to do.

I have tomato, onion in there.

I have about two cup of tomato, just dice them.

And lemon juice or lime juice in that case.

I'm gonna filter it right through my finger.

The tomato will also render some of the juice.

I have cilantro.

I can put the cilantro or maybe I'll cut it in pieces but you don't want it to be too small.

You can even shred it, shred it with your, you know, with your hand.

So it's really a cinch to do that type of salsa, which in Mexico, they call pico de gallo.

And then, you serve that with a lot of different things.

Now pepper, now I can see here I have a larger one.

Those are Jalapenos.

The round one, which sometime come also green, are called Bonnet or sometime Habanero and they are really, really hot.

And the Serrano, smaller than this one, is somewhat in between in term of hotness.

So the hotness is a question of how munch, you know, you tolerate and so forth.

Remember that a great deal of it, a great deal of the hotness is in the rib and in the seed.

So if you remove those and I always taste it anyway because sometime, they're very mild and sometime they're really hot.

So if they're really mild, I even add this.

And this one is pretty mild, I'm going to add the center of it.

So this will cut fine into a little julienne like this, that is little strip.

Even the seed, when I put them across and cut them the other side, that's it, all that goes in there.

And a little bit of garlic.

I have a head of garlic here.

Heat it on the side and that separate your cloves.

Now we'll put maybe two clove of garlic here.

And you can see, when you have a clove of garlic, the first thing you do, you take the stem of it.

You have to take the stem.

So you might as well take the stem before you peel it.

Because if you do it before you peel it, if you crush it a little bit like this, that will release the skin and that skin is going to fall very easily.

If you don't remove that stem, the flesh doesn't fall out of the skin.

For now, we're going to crush it.

You have to come to end of your board here because the finger has to clear up the table and you crush it.

That really is the essential oil.

Then you can rock it, finish, bit of garlic.

I need a dash of salt in there.

Let me check on my chicken.

Mm, a little more.

Maybe I'll turn them on the other side.

They need maybe another minute or so.

And as you can see, there is almost no liquid left.

So they continue steaming in there.

Now what I like to put in my salsa is a little bit of ketchup just to give, one or two tablespoon, to give a bit of thickening agent to the bottom.

Have an organic ketchup here, this is great, we're getting better every day.

When you see organic at the market, buy it, I do.

Okay, and I make my salsa here.

So I have garlic, onion, pico de gallo.

You have that with regular tortilla or then you can do it with the tacos, you know?

Those are really good.

So for our recipe today, if I add that, I keep that in my refrigerator for a couple of weeks.

Today, I need for that about a good half a cup, maybe a bit more of the salsa.

And to that, I'm going to use a little bit of olive oil in there.

This will be the sauce for our chicken.

And I will also put checking my chicken, the chicken is, yeah, that's cooked.

So I'm going to take the juice of that chicken and add it directly to my salsa, okay.

And keep that warm on the side.

I don't need the store anymore.

Keep that warm here.

Now we'll check my cauliflowers.

Mm, maybe another minute or so.

Well, the cauliflowers are cooked now, I'm sure.

So we're going to drain them out.

What you want to do, you can put them in the sink.

Or use your towel, use your lid here just to pour out the water.

That's it.

And we want to cut them into pieces.

And what I do, I cut them directly into the pan like this with a knife.

What I'll do first is to put the butter.

I need a couple of tablespoon of butter in there, this, dash of salt, pepper and chive.

Almost forget the chive.

You can cut them in larger piece like this to be a bit different.

That's good, maybe a bit more.

I love chive, family of the onion, you know?

And then just with your knife, you know, I cut them across like this.

I like that better than in puree really.

Okay, that's about it.

And mix it for the butter.

I love cauliflowers done this way.

Okay, we have a nice bowl.

All of that will go directly onto the bowl right here and the chicken will sit right on top of it.

So, you see that the chicken here are still a little bit of juice, which comes out of the chicken again.

So I'll do the same thing.

I'll remove that here and add the juice either on top of this or in my sauce, maybe on top of the cauliflowers.

Cut that in half.

You can see that they are barely cooked inside which is the way like them, here.

That's it.

Then, our salsa on top of it, maybe a little bit on the outside so I don't make too much of a mess.

And that's a nice easy dish to do, which my daughter Claudine loves.

So here we are, the chicken, cauliflowers, a big dish of it, our first course.

And of course, the tiramisu here that you can now, you can see, go right through it.

It goes very easily because of you can see the layer there and the top on top.

It's holding together the way it should be.

This is a fast, easy meal that we made for you today.

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

I enjoy making it for you, happy cooking.