- Everyone knows Melba toasts, but the real Melba toast was developed by the Chef Escoffier for the soprano singer, whose name was Melba, wanted her toast extremely, extremely thin.

And if you cut the toast too thin, it burns.

So what he did was to toast a piece of bread this way then you trim it on the four sides, and that is how you trim it.

And you slide your knife now in between and you will have two extremely thin toasts, which are perfect and are really what we call the Melba toast.

And on one side it's a little bit gooey, just right to put your jam.

Perfect.

I'm Jack Pepin.

This is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

You know when the day gets shorter, I think of soup, bread.

And you know if you do soup, one I'm going to do with canned beans, you can have it ready in minutes.

Make sure that you wash your leeks thoroughly under the water here, and we're ready to start the soup.

There is nothing like a country, you know, earthy type of vegetable soup.

I do some other soup at the house.

We do a famous soup that my wife called fridge soup, as we use everything leftover in the fridge.

But in that menu, I'm going to do an earthy kind vegetable soup with beans, then chicken supreme, that is the breast of chicken with a tapenade sauce.

A tapenade is with olive and anchovy in it.

And then vegetable couscous.

And finally, we are going to do a little, they say, a pear compote with crumbled almond cookie.

So a nice kind of wintery menu.

And we start with leeks.

As you see, that leek is fairly large.

I have at least two and a half, three cup of leeks there, a couple of tablespoon of olive oil.

Then we can start sweating the vegetables, so called, you know?

Here we have, so leek.

I have carrot.

Now when you peel a carrot, you should cut that end and that end first.

And then with a vegetable peeler, you have to do one streak here, you see?

You have a cut platform so you can grab it.

Now of course, you have to be careful so that your finger will never get higher than the carrot with a vegetable peeler.

But this is a proper technique.

So this is in little dice as well.

And it's really true, you know, when I open my refrigerator, if I have a zucchini left, you know, I have half of an onion, I have, you name it, some mushroom and all that, some salad, open salad left over, getting a bit wilted, that goes into the soup.

(knife thuds) And the longest to cook very often if you put potato and things like that, but in that case we are not going to put potato, that the whole idea of putting your starch at the end, you know, I mean the can.

Here it is going well.

Celery.

Celery is pretty assertive in taste and you may decide to put less or not to put any.

In any case, you can also put, what I do here, the leaf of the celery, you know?

About a cup of celery, about a cup of carrot, about two cup of leeks.

Then you can go on, I have a beautiful turnip here.

Salt.

A good dash of salt.

Pepper.

And water.

Throw in like a good four cup of water in there.

This should come to a boil.

And you know, those vegetables, especially because I sweat them a little bit, will be cooked in about 10 minutes of boiling.

Pretty fast.

For now, we are going to do, after the soup, a couscous.

And I'm going to do a vegetable couscous with all kind of different vegetables.

So I have some broccoli here.

I need about a cup of broccoli.

And very often, you see, I keep the flower of the broccoli or the florets, so called, to do one thing, but I always use that part of the broccoli as well.

That part of the broccoli for me may be the best part of the broccoli, providing you remove that very thick, fibrous skin, you know, on the outside.

But if you do this, and this is quite tender, actually a little bit like the artichoke bottom, you know?

Very often I take that and I do it Chinese style, I just cut those and I cure them with a little bit of salt, and use them, use them like this.

But you see this is now is very nice and tender.

When you finish, you know, peeling it.

So okay.

I need a good cup of this.

That's about it for this.

And I need maybe a cup of chicken stock.

If you want it to have a totally vegetarian, then you can do it with water, it's fine.

I put a cup of chickpeas in there.

Those chickpeas are cooked, you know, chickpeas.

I'm going to put a little bit of like a cup of mushroom here.

Again, you know, coarsely chopped.

Don't have to worry too much.

But you know, you could have other type of vegetable that you have, you know, in your refrigerator.

And I have some spinach here.

So all of that is going to cook before we add our couscous to it.

And this, I think I put a good dash of salt on top of this.

And we can cook that for about, has to come to a boil and cook like three, four, five minutes.

Next we are going to do a chicken tapenade, and what we call the chicken supreme.

And the chicken supreme are basically the breast of chicken like this that you buy all skinless, boneless from the supermarket, you know?

So I have those that you want to open in half.

So you can see that you have the filet here, but if you go at that end and start going into your chicken, you don't want to go too deep, but to form a nice pocket like this that you can put your garnish in it and we bring that back on top.

So this one is done.

This one is fine too.

I stuff chicken with wild mushroom a lot because I pick up wild mushroom where I am in the country and it's one of my favorite things to do.

And the stuffing that I have is a so-called tapenade.

And the tapenade is done with olives.

I have different type of olives here.

And a bit differently, what I do, I add about three quarter of a cup of olives, I add a couple of pieces of dry apricot.

Sometime I put fig, sometime apricot.

It gives me a bit of sour taste in it.

A little bit of garlic in there.

This is the type of dish you do in the south of France that we call tapenade, and it's done with different variation.

And of course, capers.

Capers sometimes are not in tapenade.

It should always be in tapenade because actually the word tapenade come from the word (speaking French), which mean capers in Provencal language.

And about six to eight, put the whole can here.

It's about eight anchovy filets.

So that's my tapenade that you can use as an hors d'oeuvres type of thing, you know?

So you would want to process this a little bit.

(processor whirring) Okay.

Into a nice puree and it's not too fine, you know?

You can do it fine or not, but I kind of like it when it's a little coarse, like this one is.

Now we stuff the chicken.

This is a pretty assertive taste, you know, the tapenade.

I bring that on top, the filet on top.

Next one.

You could actually flatten your chicken breast, you know, and roll it.

It would be fine as well.

I'm going to put a bit of olive oil and start this.

Here we are.

Those chicken have to cook a little bit I think three minute on each side.

Remember that the stuffing there is not a stuffing which has to cook.

Sometime, you know, you put raw meat or you put certain thing in a stuffing, so you have to be sure that the temperature get the right way in the center of it.

In a case like this, this is a pre-cooked type of stuffing, you know, so.

Good.

That's plenty.

And now, we are ready.

(oil sizzling) We'll saute this.

And I say about two, three minutes on each side.

What I would want to do actually is to put a bit of salt and pepper on top, freshly ground pepper.

And I probably will cover it so it cooks the right way.

I'll make sure that it's not sticking.

Here it is.

Good.

So now I can cover it.

And look at my couscous.

Now those vegetables are basically cooked enough here.

A nice color.

Actually, it's good.

So I can put my couscous and this is a, you know, the instant couscous.

This is a 10-ounce package, which is about one and a half cup.

So I mix this in there.

Make sure that everything is wet.

I think that I should have a little more water here, and the reason is that I think I have maybe too much evaporation.

During the cooking time, you should have about the same amount of water than couscous.

So let it cook, cover it like that and let it steep like that.

I'm going to shut off the heat even.

And let it steep in its own steam, you know, and it'll cook this way.

Let me check on the chicken.

(pan sizzling) I could probably turn this.

See, this is bad cooking what I'm doing because I kill a hand by holding the thing.

Put it somewhere so you can use both hands.

That's it.

Now I'm going to reduce the heat.

Going a bit fast here.

I'm going to reduce the heat and let it cook another four, five minutes.

During that time, maybe I'll finish the soup.

I have to wash my hands after handling the chicken.

Okay.

And let's see where we are with the soup.

Smells good.

I can smell the vegetables.

Here we are.

See my soup cooked for five minutes.

It's practically cooked enough.

So the beans will go in it with everything in it, the juice and so forth.

Those are so-called cannelloni beans.

You could have white beans, you could have any type of beans but it give you some unctuousy taste, some creaminess, you know, to the soup.

So this comes back to a boil.

And this of course, I want to serve with good bread, country bread here.

There is nothing like bread, you know, to serve with soup.

Nice piece of bread.

People ask me very often, "What is the greatest dish you can think of?"

I say if you have the greatest bread and the greatest butter, bread and butter is very hard to beat, you know, and it's true.

And of course, when I'm cooking, I always like to enjoy a glass of wine and I have a Müller-Thurgau here.

Müller-Thurgau is a type of grapes, you know, which grows in the north part of Italy, as well as in Austria.

And that's a very good, a bit acidic wine, very well-balanced, fruity, with strong aroma of fruit.

And this is really good.

Okay.

My soup, I think, is boiling now.

So we can see the bubble around and a strong boil is going to be enough.

Good.

We can finish that actually with a little bit of butter, if you want to be.

If you don't want it rich, you could have a little bit of olive oil that I can put on top as well, you know, like this.

That'd be good.

Bread in the bottom.

And you know, a nice bowl of soup like this, bread, piece of cheese, this is it, you know?

Right.

A little more olive oil on top.

Maybe a bit of chives for color.

It's always nice to have some herb at the end, you know, in a soup.

And a little piece of grated Swiss cheese, you know, on top of it.

A good Gruyere, you know, or Emmentaler on top.

And this is it.

Earthy vegetable soup with bread and cheese.

So.

See the chicken breast are about as thick as that, but by the time I open them, then they're only that thick on each side and they do cook relatively fast, and you really don't want to ever cook them too much, otherwise they get dry.

So let's see if the chicken is cooked, I can place it right on the table here.

Right on that serving thing.

Those are large breasts of chicken.

Here we are.

Good.

Onion.

I have beautiful crystallization, you see in the bottom of this, you can see that.

And this is what I want really.

I'll put some onion in there, put in there.

And mushroom.

(knife thudding) Four here.

I think, do I have enough?

Well, I have one left, I might as well use it.

Okay.

I can even deglaze that if I want with a little bit of water or if I want to soften my mushroom, I'll put the lid back a second on it, and then after, I'll deglaze it with a bit of white wine and finish it with a tablespoon of butter to finish the sauce.

This should be ready.

See, now the couscous should be really soft as it is there.

I have quite a lot of couscous here, as I say about a cup and a half.

But by the time, you double it in the same amount of liquid.

If anything actually the couscous should be less, because very often, one cup, your couscous tend to be a bit gooey.

So I would say like three quarter of a cup of liquid for a cup of couscous is kind of more than enough.

And there, I've been very generous for four people.

I have enough for probably eight here.

Okay, the broccoli.

Here we are.

Always maybe put a little bit of olive oil on top too or I'd like to finish with a bit of olive oil.

Okay.

Even some parsley, maybe a couple of pieces of parsley that I have here.

And then, let's see.

My chicken, you can see now that it's softened.

I deglaze with a little bit of wine, you know, quarter of a cup maybe at the most.

And you can see here that the juice or the crystallization that I had in the bottom here, the solidified juice, what we call glaze, and the purpose of deglazing is to melt those glaze.

So those solidified juice are glazed and as you can see here, they will be totally melted.

And that's how you create the sauce and that the reason why you want a very good piece of equipment, thick, heavy.

Because if it's a very thin piece of equipment, instead of having crystallized juice, it burns and you have black spot.

And of course, those burned glaze when you deglaze or you put liquid to release it, then they taste bitter.

So that's why the equipment is important.

We finish that up with a good tablespoon of butter, you know, to thicken the sauce a little bit.

Bring it to a boil, that will emulsify it.

Taste it.

Always taste.

Little dash of salt.

Maybe we finish with a bit of, I have nice flat parsley here.

And let's see what the chicken is like.

There is always juice which will come out of your chicken.

So be sure to add that to the sauce.

You see the juice is nice and dark, meaning that the chicken is cooked.

I have my plate here.

We can put one breast of chicken like this.

I can even open one to show you.

This is really large breast of chicken, you know.

Right here.

This one.

This one.

Okay, pour this ready on top.

Okay.

(pan thuds) Parsley, just rough like that.

It's fine.

It's beautiful and fresh.

The leaves.

And here we are, the chicken soup supreme with tapenade and mushroom sauce.

(gentle music) Pear compote and almond crumbled cookie, that goes very well together.

You know when you cook fruit, the amount of time that you cook it depend entirely on the ripeness of the fruit.

You know, you have a recipe will tell you cook the pear for 20 minutes.

Why does the recipe tell you that?

Because they, whoever wrote the recipe made it, it took 20 minutes.

That's what happened to me.

Some of the time, if you have a Bartlett pear, for example, very ripe.

You bring it to a boil, it's basically cooked.

Next time you have like Bosc like this, you may sometime boil them for 30 minutes, 40 minutes and they're still hard.

So in any case here, you bring that to a boil.

I have apple, sweet apple juice in it, and maple syrup.

Bring them to a boil and cook them.

Oh, we have to put a bit of the rind of lime here.

You can use lemon, of course.

In fact, you could use tangerine or something else.

So cut the rind like this in what we call a julienne.

You know, we cut it into little strips like this.

Here we are.

So we put that in there.

Even a little bit of the juice that you can put here.

And then you want to bring that to a boil.

And cover them.

So that's when you cover them, the steam goes in, and you boil them gently basically until they are tender.

You can go with a knife, see whether they are tender.

When they are tender, you remove your lid and you boil them on top of the stove to reduce that until you come to what I have here, where those pears are totally tender and I have a little bit of the juice, which now are thickened with the sugar at the bottom.

And that's what we're going to serve with the almond crumble cookie, which are very, very easily done.

Add flour to the processor along with a tablespoon of sugar and a cup of toasted almonds.

Process until it's all finely ground.

Add vanilla, butter, and water.

And that's it.

Process until it gathers together.

(processor whirring) Roll into portion the side of a cherry and press them gently onto a lined baking sheet.

Bake for 20, 25 minute, and cool and roll in powdered sugar.

Serve with the pears, garnish with sour cream and lime zest.

You know when you make a batch of cookie with your kid, it does add to the pleasure of the kitchen.

So cook with your friend, cook with your kid.

And happy cooking.