- For that cold soup, I take a can of black beans, Tabasco, olive oil, garlic, put it in the food processor with a bit of chicken stock, garnish it with a little bit of sour cream, crushed tortilla on top.

You can put cilantro and even sliced banana into it.

(gentle music) I'm Jacques Pepin, and this is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

I'm doing custard of asparagus today.

And the thing that I do, I always peel my asparagus.

And the best way is to do it with a vegetable peeler.

You can do it against your finger.

There is no danger of cutting yourself here.

And you rotate that asparagus, I mean that asparagus around, yes, moving to have like a flowers, you know, with all of the petal there.

And then you can break it at the joint.

Now, that part here now is just as tender as that part here.

If you don't do that, it's going to be tender up to about here, and the rest, you have to throw it out, so it's a shame.

And by the way, buy big, fat asparagus.

It is a fallacy to believe that the tiny asparagus you buy will eventually get fat and bigger.

No, the tiny asparagus come out of the ground tiny, and it grows up tiny, still tiny, get tough and open.

So a fat asparagus is not an older asparagus.

It's just a fat asparagus, and that's what you want.

So here, what we are going to do is two dishes actually.

With the tip of the asparagus, we keep as a garnish.

With the bottom, we're going to do a custard.

So I'm covering that, and that should cook in a couple of minute here until it's tender.

I think my asparagus are pretty... Oh, yep, another 10, 15 seconds here.

What I'm going to do is actually to do some custard in those little mold here.

This is about half a cup mold, and I want to butter them.

What you do, take a little piece of butter.

Move from one to the other.

Another piece.

And that, you know, those custard are great because you can do them ahead.

I can even have done that yesterday.

And that custard, you reheat it in water, and it's perfect.

So it's great for catering or special party that you may want to do.

Let's see now.

Yeah, that's tender enough.

Okay, we gotta remove this.

In fact, I'll throw that, I'll throw the water out.

That's it.

Put that here.

And what we want to keep is the head of the asparagus.

They are beautiful as you can see, nice and green.

Whew, they are hot, too.

So the tip of the asparagus, about that much, which is the best, we keep that for a garnish.

I should have plenty anyway with this.

Oh, another one here.

And the rest of it, we're gonna put that in the food processor to emulsify it.

So now I want to put all of that bottom part in the food processor here.

That's it.

You wanna put a clove of garlic in there.

Cut the end of it.

I like the taste of garlic when it doesn't dominate.

So the clove, mm, it's pretty big.

I'll crush it before I put it into the food processor because sometime when it's whole, it kind of turn around and doesn't liquefy properly.

It's pepper and salt.

That's it, and now let it turn.

Two eggs.

Let's see that we do.

And about half a cup of cream.

That's it.

So it's quite easy to do.

And we're gonna cook that.

I'm going to cook it in the same pot here, in a kind of double boiler.

That is, with water around.

So let's see.

My custard here, two.

Little more here, here, just about, okay.

Then you want to put tepid water around.

You really don't want to put water too, too hot boiling, but at least, well, tepid or hot water.

This one happened to be hot.

And that has to go in the oven, 350 degree, about 15, 20 minutes.

And that can set in the liquid.

And as I say, you know, you can do that ahead and reheat it on top of the stove with warm water right in the skillet.

So the point of our asparagus now, I'm going to saute them as a garnish.

And I will cut them in four pieces, with a little piece of butter.

And this will be as a garnish for the custard, you know.

Little piece of butter here.

Remember, many people tell you, you cannot drink wine with asparagus.

Why not?

I mean, I drink wine with anything.

But it is true that you have the asparagus or artichokes, it give a taste to the wine.

It's all right.

I'd rather have a taste from the wine than no wine at all.

So this has to cut, you know, saute a few second like this, it's warm, and we're going to serve it as a garnish with the custard.

At the last moment, when you're ready, you have to warm up your asparagus tip.

And on your custard, run a knife all the way around.

Those have been cooked and have rested.

Put your plate right on top of it to be able to unmold it.

And then you can garnish it with your asparagus tip, you know, on top and around.

(gentle music) And this is a wonderful first course for an elegant dinner.

I'm going to make tuna steak, slow cook in the oven.

It's a very different type of recipe.

I have those beautiful tuna here, you can see, bluefin, about one inch thick, nice and clean.

Salt and pepper on each one of those.

Actually, I need two for the time being.

So I will put the pepper here also, on the other side.

Tuna now is used raw, you know, in tartare, in carpaccio, and cooked, cooked rare.

I mean, it's cooked in five or six different way.

This way, it's very easy.

You put it directly on the plate where you're going to serve it.

So what you wanna do is to put a tiny bit of oil on top of it so that I can rub the steak directly in it.

That's it.

This one, too.

And then you put that into your oven.

Now, you may say, the oven, and plate?

Yes, because this is 200-degree oven.

200 degree oven is perfectly fine for your plate.

That's how I hit my plate very often.

So 200 degree for 20 minute for a rare piece of tuna.

And you'll see, when it comes out of the oven, it doesn't even look cooked, but it's just cooked through.

And then we can do a couple of relish to serve on top.

But first, I'm going to start the dessert, which is a kind of an apple done with a kind of sour pancake batter, you know, so it's a kind of dessert that you do right in the skillet and use in the same skillet.

I have two, two apple here, and those are soft apple, McIntosh type.

And, again, be sure that when you remove this, you use your thumb here to protect yourself when you do that technique.

Otherwise, if you don't do that, that goes into your hand.

So you have to be super careful there.

And you can peel your apple with a vegetable peeler or with a knife.

So this, you can do that with another type of apple, too.

But those are fine.

We're gonna cut that in wedge.

Same technique to remove the center here, put your thumb.

Here's one.

And then we need to cut that each in eight pieces.

So four, eight, that's it.

A piece of butter.

And we're going to brown it with a little bit of sugar, with a little bit of sugar.

And we'll do a batter after to put on top of it, kind of pancake batter.

You can arrange that like if you were doing a tart here, you know.

Now, this has to cook for about five minutes on each side.

Then I'm going to sprinkle some sugar on top.

That's going to caramelize, you know.

I'm going to do the butter in there with about 3/4 of a cup of flour.

I have about two tablespoon of sugar I'm going to put on top, about 3/4 of a cup of cottage cheese, and the same amount of sour cream.

Here it is, the flour and sugar, vanilla, a good teaspoon, and eggs, three eggs.

One, two, and three.

Let me see now whether... Yep.

That's it.

You can see that in a pan like that, even in the center of the stove, you know, I have one side which is browner than the other.

See, this is browner than this.

So what you want to do, you move this to have more of the flame on this side.

Even the best of pan will not be exactly equal in each transfer.

There is always one side which heats a little more.

Going to lower that a little bit and finish the batter.

Okay.

You know, my apple are about cooked now.

But that type of dish, you know, I can stop the apple now.

Leave them on the side, doesn't really make any difference.

The batter is ready here, and I can finish it up when I need to finish it up to have it warm at the end of the meal.

So I want to show you a couple of other things to do with the tuna.

To start with, I have those two tuna in the oven, remember?

And we have to do a sauce for it.

And the first sauce that I want to show you, it's a very simple type of salsa, where you take some tomato, press out the seed of your tomato.

That, you always keep that for stock.

You can freeze it.

And then, we can do a little dice of tomato.

And I will actually add some onion to it.

And some salsa, I have salsa that I sometime do fresh, and sometime I buy it.

This one, I do it with cilantro and... But it's a bit too strong by itself.

So what I do here, we put tomato in it.

Here we are, a dash of salt.

A little bit of olive oil in there.

And some chives.

A little bit of onion, that's it, finely chopped onion.

And this is to serve right on top of your, of your tuna, you know.

Now, there is all kind of variation that you can do with this.

See, this look fine, nice and fresh.

It will go well with the tuna.

But another variation, here, I can see what I have in my refrigerator here.

And maybe this one, I have some scallion.

Maybe a little bit of scallion.

This is the idea of cooking with the refrigerator or with the pantry or with the time or with the market or whatever.

I have some tiny olives here.

You can leave them whole if you want to crack them.

You know, crack them this way to remove the pit inside.

Those are small Kalamata olives.

And, you know, if you crack your olive like this, then the pit will slide out.

Oh, that will be a nice garnish for the tuna, too.

So I have scallion.

I could put a bit of red onion here, looks good.

I could put capers in there.

Capers would be very nice.

Here it is.

And maybe basil on this one, since I have chives on the other one, so basil on this one.

Again, in a julienne like this, or chiffonade, we call.

A dash of salt, bit of pepper.

That's it.

A bit of olive oil.

And I can serve that on the second steak.

I can actually put even a little bit of lime juice.

But if I put it, I would put it at the end, because the citric acid in there is going to kind of eat the green here, and from nice green is going to turn slightly yellow.

So if I use it, I use it at the end.

Another thing that we do, or I do, with raw fish is carpaccio or tartare.

You see, when you have the center of the fish here, keep the center for carpaccio.

It's always more tender.

This you use for tartare.

There is always a bit more fiber on the outside.

If you do a tartare, you would want to cut it by hand in pieces like this.

Okay, that will be a tartare.

I can place it right in there and season it here.

And then if I want to do a carpaccio, what you do with a piece of plastic wrap, we can cut that in half to start with, to open it like this.

And you can do a gravlax with this or place it right on top of plastic wrap.

Put another piece on top.

And you pound it, you know.

Now, you see the system that I cook my fish in the oven.

I could have actually a sauce.

Sometime I do a warm sauce, you know, to serve with this.

I could have very hot plate.

If I have very hot plates, I put this on my warm plate, with the sauce on top, and it's cooked.

I can keep that in the refrigerator, put it on that plate, put it under the broiler, 20-second on each side, I would have another recipe.

Here, what I do, put salt and pepper in the bottom.

Okay, now you place your carpaccio on top of it.

We call that a carpaccio when, in fact, Carpaccio was a painter of the chiaroscuro period at the end of the 15th century in Italy.

And he painted with a great deal of red and white.

So someone decided to do a steak tartare, which was red, sliced very thin, with a strip of mayonnaise, white, and name it after Carpaccio.

Now everything that we do thin and all that, we call carpaccio.

I can put, let's say here, a little bit of a skin of lemon.

We have a shallot here, maybe very thin shallot.

I will have shallot right there, chives maybe.

Radish, I love radish.

If you cut them thin, pile them up, and do a julienne, you know, it's crunchy, and it's a little bit not like horseradish, but a little bit hot, you know.

Nice little bit of olive oil.

And here you have a carpaccio, which is beautiful.

It's good also because, I mean, you use about four ounces of the fish, and you have quite a lot out of it.

Here is a tartare, as I say, salt, pepper on the tartare, olive oil.

Maybe some dill, some dill here, on top of the tartare goes well with it.

You could have even a little bit of the fennel.

It's actually fennel, not dill, same family.

Give you some crunchiness in your tartare here.

And that's it, you can serve that with this, you know, other combination.

You could even serve a little bit in the center of your carpaccio if you wanted to, you know, to make you fancier.

Okay.

All you can do with the different type of fish, and now I think that my oven, slow-baked oven tuna is ready.

Slow-cooked tuna steak, and the first time that I did that, I finished cooking, I said, this doesn't look cooked.

And it is cooked.

It's hard until the bottom.

If I turn it on the other side, you see it's darker in color.

Then we'll leave it on this side.

And even cut through, the meat is cooked here, totally just pink the way it should be.

So it makes a very, very tender type of dishes.

And I do that with the whole salmon or thing like this.

So here we have one of the garnish here, which is the basil, red onion.

It is hot.

And then the second one with the kind of hot salsa, you know.

Here it is, the slow-cook tuna steak.

(gentle music) When you're ready to finish the apple, warm it up a little bit, and then put your batter on top of it here.

And that basically cover all of your apple here.

You could cook this directly into the oven, you know.

Or you can cook it on the stove covered, as I'm going to do.

You can see that the whole thing is moving together, and it's kind of solid here.

I mean, if it were a smaller one, you would flip it and cook on the other side.

But this is too big, so we put it into, under the broiler or in a hot oven for a few minutes to finish the top.

Here we are.

That's a big pancake.

You would want to put a lot of powdered sugar on top of it.

I love powdered sugar.

That's it, and this, you know, (gentle music) you would cut it now into wedge like this.

A wedge would serve like a large pancake, see?

Nice and creamy inside.

And with this, I think I deserve a glass of red wine now.

I deserve a glass of red wine when I cook and when I have finished.

If I have to eat one apple a day, that's probably the way I would want to eat my apple.

Happy cooking.