- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

Here in Connecticut there is a special excitement to the springtime.

The snow has melted, the trees are flowering, and best of all for me, the farmers start bringing wonderful things to market.

It's a great excuse to make an elegant, healthy spring meal.

Tender asparagus tips in a tangy mustard sauce, a spicy beef roast with a little crust, surrounded by fresh carrots and peas with pearl onions.

And for the third, a fluffy pistachio island floating on a sea of strawberries.

So come celebrate spring with style on "Today's Gourmet."

(relaxed music) (relaxed music continues) This is springtime, and springtime for me are tiny little vegetables.

Crunchy, different color, I mean those are very good for you, the vegetable, and of course summer is coming and I may think that, I live on the shoreline, if I want to go to the beach, put my bathing suit, it's time to go a little bit on a diet.

So we are going to do a lot of vegetable today in the menu.

They are very good in fiber, low-fat, so this is the ideal type of food.

And we're going to start by doing a piece, French-style, Petits Pois à la Française as we call.

It's a very classic dish done with tiny onion.

And I have here those tiny pearl onion, you cut both hand of it and peel it.

Again, indication of spray those tiny onion.

And we're going to cook that first because that takes longer.

We're going to put that to cook with some water.

Here I have a cup of water cooked to start and a dash of sugar in it.

And I have some Herb de Provence here, herb from Provence.

And there's a lot of different mixture in it.

You can even maybe see those tiny bluish, those are actually lavender flowers.

And there is, you have rosemary, you have thyme, you have even fennel seed in there.

And those are called Herb de Province, a whole mixture that I use very often with meat or vegetable.

We put that in there, a bit of olive oil, dash of salt, the cracked pepper in it, freshly ground pepper.

And this is our fourth part, I mean this has to cook those tiny onion.

Remember sometime you may even want to use the frozen onion if you cannot find the other one.

But this is better of course to have the fresh one.

So with this we are going to use peas.

And I have a lot of peas here.

I want to talk to you about peas.

I have those peas that I'm going to shell here.

And of course when you shell them, you press on it, crack it open and just run your finger down to peel them.

Now you may notice however, that in the pea itself, sometime you have small one and sometime you have large one.

And what happened is that the large ones are always a bit heavier, a bit more starch, they go to the bottom.

You know that part of the pea here, when I was a kid, my mother used to make soup with it.

And remember often I use a vegetable food mill, you know, and that's what I would use for it because there is a lot of fiber.

But you can cook it with chicken stock, water, potato, put the whole thing to the foot mill so the fiber remain and you just get the flesh that you have here, which is quite good actually.

Now peas is maybe one of the only vegetable that I use a lot frozen in winter because they are quite good.

I have two frozen vegetables here.

This is what is called tiny baby peas, and this is the larger one.

I tend to like the tiny baby peas.

Remember in the pod, as I show you, sometime in the same pod, you're going to have a very small pea and a very large one like this.

Well, when they shell those peas, what happened is that they put them in water and salt and because of the starch in it, the big one goes to the bottom, the tiny one with sugar float to the top, they are pulled out, so those are very good.

What I want to do now, actually, if I use frozen peas, I put them at the end of the recipe with lettuce.

We have a lettuce to go in that recipe also.

But because I'm using the fresh peas they are a bit longer to cook, so I'm going to put the my peas with it in it now.

And then we go to our second vegetable today, this is a carrot.

and the Carotte Vichy we call and the Carotte Vichy, in the style of Vichy, it's in a simple style of cooking.

And I'm going to show you how to peel carrot.

Anything long, you cut the end of it first and that create a platform.

And now with a vegetable peeler on that platform, you can put your vegetable pillar flat and go one streak to go around.

This is the proper way of peeling a carrot rather than going around.

Rather than going on this way then this way and so forth.

Of course, when you do that, the carrot is to pivot on top of your finger without being, I mean your finger without your finger being higher than the carrot, so it's not in the way.

So it takes a little bit of practice, and it's easier, of course, with a zucchini or a larger thing.

So we are going to slice those carrots very thin, but I have some right there, and they are placed again with water.

You see, when we cook vegetable with a little bit of water, I put it at the end, it kind of steam the vegetable and cook them with water.

But I never retrieve the water, it become a sauce.

So all the nutrients stay in.

For example, here, I'm going to put a cup of water here.

That pan is very hot, my carrot in it.

Oh, I lost a piece here.

I put a bit of sugar, a little dash of salt, and a piece of butter.

Now what happened in the cooking process, the water will reduce, of course, it's going to cook down and eventually I will be left with the sugar and the bit of butter, and it's going to glaze the carrot, you know?

And this is the technique that I wanted to do.

And at the end we are going to put some chive on top of it.

For the time being, we are going to do the meat.

And here I have a roast that we want to do.

And that roast, as you can see here, is a piece of shell.

Of course, the best piece.

But this come from the butcher what we call trimmed.

This is completely trimmed, well, it's not enough for us.

We want to trim it completely, removing all the fat really.

Remember that beef is good for you.

I mean, it has a lot of, not only protein, but a lot of iron in it.

And providing, again you do as I'm doing here, removing any type of visible fat even I would rather have a smaller portion, but I mean have it completely clean, you know?

But that's what we do, and so that we don't use too much salt, we do a mixture here of different type of herb.

And I have oregano, and rosemary, and thyme, a bit of cayenne, not too much because it's very hot, a bit of black pepper, you can crush those a little bit and then we cover our steak with it, you know?

On each side, you dip it into it.

Still put a little bit of salt, but just a dash, you know?

and you combine it all together if you don't want to use salt.

We're going to, a dash of olive oil and we put that to brown here.

Now I want it to be very crusty.

So this will cook for about four minute on one side, three, four minute, brown it on each side, and during that time I want to move to our first course, which is asparagus.

And I want to discuss asparagus with you.

Asparagus by the way, are very good in folic acid and that's good for pregnant women.

It is also a very low type of calorie vegetable.

And our recipe today, even with the sauce, is about 80 calories, so it's good.

I wanna show you what a good asparagus is.

This is a good asparagus.

It is a fallacy to believe that asparagus should be small asparagus.

The large one are the best, that is asparagus don't start growing out of the ground small and get bigger, they just grow out of the ground either small or big.

So it's not because an asparagus is small that it's younger, no.

Now what you look for is a firm asparagus and a tight head.

Look at that head.

It's like that asparagus with the bud of a flower, you know?

On the other hand that asparagus here, you can, it's like flowers, you know the petal of the flowers which are falling off.

This is an older asparagus, it's soft.

So this is what we need.

And that asparagus here, we're going to peel because only that part is eatable unless you peel it.

So I put it flat, roll it like this and you peel your asparagus to the end.

Now you just cut the end of it, meaning that that part here, that you would normally not use, you are now using it because you've peeled it.

I always peel my asparagus so I can use all of it.

In our recipe today, often we cook those asparagus whole this way.

What we are going to do here, we cut them on a bias this way in pieces.

And what we do with that, and I have some which are cooked right here.

I put a little bit of water in the bottom of a stainless steel pan, just as much of this to steam it, put my asparagus in it, no salt, nothing, and kind of steam them a couple of minutes, and those are ready now, and you don't refresh them or anything.

Now what I want to do is the sauce for it.

and the sauce is a mustard sauce.

We are putting french-type mustard in there, hot mustard, cracked pepper, a lot of black cracked pepper in it, a dash of salt, and we are using a canola oil here that is a polyunsaturated type of oil, which I like, which is very light, you could use an olive oil, you could use a bit of walnut oil if you want to do that mustard sauce.

Okay, we put it together and that's about all there is to it.

You know, we put the asparagus in it at the last moment to marinate them into the sauce.

We toss them around this way so they are nicely coated with the dressing and we serve them.

So I have here a nice portion of my beautiful asparagus and they are good.

And now I want to check on my steak, which is probably ready to turn at least.

Now as you can see, it's nicely brown on this side, I want that crust, because that crust is going to give me the juice that I need in it, that crystallization it also hold the juice inside.

I can also finish my peas.

Now I have the lettuce here, and this is a Boston lettuce, you know?

And I will need for that maybe half of the lettuce and just cut it very forcefully this way because I also use the stem on it.

I cut a bit a bit smaller because it's tougher, but I like to use it, it's crunchy.

And that goes into our peas.

And I say again, you know, all of the vegetables there are cooked in the juice and nothing is discarded, you know?

This, let cook a couple of minutes, then I can check my carrot are doing fine.

I think now it's time to put that steak into the oven.

It's brown on both sides.

I wanna cook it on high heat, about 450 degree for about eight, ten minutes.

Put it in there.

I have another one which is cooked here and I'm putting a little bit of chicken stock to make a sauce with it at the end to melt those crystallized juice.

I have that here.

And it is the time now to finish our plate and clean up the table a little bit.

Always clean up behind you, that's what my wife tell me, so I clean up behind me.

and we have a nice plate here to serve the meat and our two vegetable in it.

The meat should rest, you know, a few minutes because when it finished cooking, you see when the meat cook, the meat contract in cooking and it push the juice toward the center of the meat.

If you take a piece of meat out of the oven and just cut it open and all of the outside look gray, like if it was overcooked, and all the center is flabby, uncooked and very juicy like and lukewarm.

If you it relax the meat open, the juice, which is the myoglobin, the muscle tissue go through the meat and the whole thing is pink, you know?

So it's very important to let the meat rest for a little bit.

What we are going to do here, as you see it's nicely crusted and then I have a nice pink color in that meat, this is what you want.

Now two small slice like this because this is for four, yes, at least two slice like this.

I like to cut it small.

Just to rest a little bit I'm gonna put this here, this here.

Now a little bit of the natural juice here that I have by putting a bit of chicken stock as you see, it's dark brown, beautiful color.

I'll put the meat back in there, keep it on the side and look at my peas, they're about ready.

Now, if I have a lot of juice in the peas left, I thicken the juice a little bit with a mixture of potato starch usually, that I use, which is mixed with a bit of water.

And I put a little bit of that in there so that the juice is not too runny on the plate.

You know, that's better than putting more butter in it at the end, you know?

So I have thickened this.

Look at my carrot, they are perfect, now I can hear them sizzling, meaning that I have no more liquid, meaning that everything has reduced and now the little bit of sugar and butter at the end is glazing, and I can see it's glazing and I can hear it.

So this is perfect the way it should be.

And now we garnish our plate with it.

Maybe with the, look at those vegetable, you see the lettuce cook less, the peas a little more, and finally the onion more.

So you have to calculate to cook your vegetables so that they all cook together at the right moment.

I love those vegetable like this.

And for a portion, we use more than that because our recipe is made for four portion here.

So as you can see, I have twice probably as much vegetable that I could give.

So you can put the vegetable in a sauce bowl and pass around with it.

And here we are, I mean our spring vegetable and our beautiful roast.

(relaxed music) For our spring elegance menu, we want a light dessert, something not too heavy and of course strawberry are in season now, it's spring.

The dessert is made of a meringue.

We call it floating island, Île Flottante in French.

It is a little bit the same thing than the snow eggs, which is the Oeufs à la Neige, which are done individually and poached with the meringue.

This is done into a container and pushed directly into the oven, unmolded, and it's what?

It's a floating island, you know?

and usually that was done into a Crème anglaise, you know, the custard cream made of egg yolk, and cream, and sugar and so forth.

For us here we are doing a fruit sauce with it made of strawberry and some raspberry preserve.

So that's, of course, it's much less calories.

I mean a typical dessert maybe like 500 calorie, this one, low-fat of course, we have no egg yolk in the meringue, is going to be about 200 the calorie.

So what I have done here, I have whipped the the egg white already and in the mixture of egg white, we are going to put some strawberry and some pistachio nuts.

When I buy the pistachio like that, try to get them, I get them sometimes shell or un-shell, The important part is to be sure not to have them salted.

You know, sometimes there is salt in it.

If you have them salted, what you do, you drop them in boiling water.

All I have done here and actually that help to remove some of the second skin that you have on top, so they are nice and green.

But what we are going to do here is to actually hold those things.

You can hold them with the point of a knife or there is a strawberry holder.

What we want to do here, it's dice, dice berry in the mixture, we call it a sel picon, the dice berry that we put in there in pieces here, this way there.

And this is our garnish, first it gives some taste, but also some color to the inside of that mixture, which is totally white of course because it is a meringue, you know.

So two or three berries, you see it makes a big difference when you see a berry, which is juicy, you can see the color of the base and you know, like for example, this one is dark at the end and you know it's going to be sweet, but you can reduce your sugar.

This one at the end is slightly yellowish or greenish, you know that it's going to be tart.

I mean looking at that berry, it give me goose pimple all around the tongue before I bite into it.

I know it's going to be a bit acid, you know?

So, those nuts here, which are nice and green, you can of course put another type of nuts in it, just cut them coarsely or crush them as we are doing here.

And all of this is going to go into our meringue here that I have, put it in there, and you fold it with a big spatula like this, gently.

I have beaten my egg white a few minutes ago and you know when you beat them ahead, they do have a little bit of a tendency to break down.

Now you can cook that in a double boiler, you know, you cook them in a double boiler, for us and I like to put them into a loaf pan.

Sometime I do them even in a pate mold, which is a long things in metal like this.

And it's easy to cut in slice after.

Here we have a regular loaf pan that I'm going to put there.

And, of course, you butter or oil it just lightly on the outside.

So you put that mixture in it and you have now to cook it in the double boiler.

If I were to cook that directly in the oven without the double boiler, what will happen, it would go up like a souffle, a lot.

And then after it's a bit more rubbery.

So what we do, we cook it slower in a double boiler.

And this is, double boiler of course means that you put water around.

Water just from the tap, you know, that's fine, just lukewarm so that the heat transfer goes through the water, and it cooks slower in a more equal way.

Well that's what we are going to put them in the oven, this way.

That of course you can do the day before.

You know, that type of the dessert usually you do ahead because it has to cool off in the refrigerator for a few hours.

So it's better even to do it ahead, you know?

So it's ideal for party.

You know you're going to do a party?

Do that day or two day ahead is fine.

We're going to do the sauce in the food processor here.

And for this I'm going to put some fresh strawberry in there, you know, that you cut.

And cut them into pieces.

Sometime I do a dessert, you know, which is a strawberry with a strawberry sauce.

I pick up the strawberry, which are the nicest one or the top part of it, which is really ripe, and all the bottom part of it with some jam I do a sauce and mix that top part in the sauce.

Strawberry with strawberry, which is terrific.

So there we don't put any sugar because we are putting some jam, and this is, of course, raspberry jam in it.

Now that raspberry jam is seedless, you know?

And, of course, if you use a raspberry jam with the seed, then you may want to strain it after.

Then I have some Crème de Cassis, This is a black currant, you know, a black current liquor like.

So we strain this.

(food processor whirring) Bring this around there, bring it back together to be sure that everything is nice and smooth.

This, of course, it a miracle machine.

I mean, years ago we used to strain it, you know, by hand.

And now it's so much easier to do it with this.

Put your sauce right into this.

Okay, and now you're ready to serve it.

Of course I have one which has been in the refrigerator cooling for a few hours.

So I am going to finish it up and unmold it on top of this.

So I'll go get it in my refrigerator.

This one is cold as you can see.

All you have to do to cool it off, put a piece of plastic wrap on top so it doesn't get crusty.

Bring it back together, your mold on top, turn it upside down, hopefully it'll come out.

It does come out usually, I'm lucky today.

Up, I didn't put it in the center, it can be moved.

I can sprinkle, you know, a little bit of that sauce on top of it just for color before I bring it in the dining room.

I could even slice a couple of berry if you want to do garnish on it, you know?

Around and all this to give some color.

I mean it's spring, you want that type of thing.

And other portion, just to show you the inside, can put a bit of the sauce on top of your plate here.

And I'll cut a little bit, as you can see it cut quite nicely.

Put it down.

You can see, I can see the piece that show inside, which are really nice.

Maybe a bit of berry on top too.

And this is our spring dessert.

And now let's recap our menu for today.

I'm bringing the dessert to the dining room.

See our nice dessert made of egg, white and strawberry and raspberry sauce, of course.

We have started the menu today with the asparagus there, which I mentioned, you know are a very low-calorie and nice mustard sauce.

And of course we have the beef.

Beef is very good for you, high in iron and with all of those spring vegetable it's even better for what we want to do.

And of course our dessert, which also is kind of low-calorie under 200 calorie.

So the whole menu together is about 900 calorie.

And a third of those 900 calorie, of course, is from fat.

So which is relatively very little.

Of course you can add a couple of slice of bread to it if you want, which is what I do.

And a nice glass here we have a Saint-Aubin.

Beaune this is from the lower part of Burgundy where I come from.

So that remind me of my hometown in France.

And I hope you have enjoyed our spring elegance menu today, I enjoyed making it for you, happy cooking!