- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

Special friends deserve special treatment, especially at your table.

Spend a bit more time and a bit more money and the result can be truly memorable.

Like an Italian-inspired party, red onion and orange salad is a perfect summer starter.

Ossobuco will shine bright with aromatic vegetable and white wine, goes perfectly with a chewy saffron flavor brown rice and a raspberry trifle with nectarine sauce made with homemade yogurt cheese.

It is as beautiful to look at as it is simple to make.

Join me as I prepare great food for special friends Mediterranean style on "Today's Gourmet."

(easygoing jazz music) Today we're going to do a great meal for you.

Great food for special friend, bit more expensive than usual maybe.

We are doing a beautiful vill dish, very moist, very savory, very lean, actually, Italian type of dish, an Ossobuco.

I love Italian food.

My wife and I are crazy about pasta and stuff.

And we do that at the house almost two, three, four times a week.

We're going to start that menu with the first course, which is a red onion and orange salad with tomato.

And what I have here, I have those tiny, and often, you know, throughout the year, I tend to choose the plump tomato because they are relatively good in supermarket.

Cut them in half like this, expose the seed, I'm going to press the seed out of it.

And that of course you keep for stock.

Remember at home I take a quart of milk, you know, one of those quart of milk when it's empty, one of those carton, and I wash it out and put it in the freezer or keep it.

And when I have a lot of leftover seed like the skin or juice of orange, the stem of parsley, pieces of garlic, any of that stuff, I put it in there.

Next time I do a stock, just grab the frozen carton of milk there, cut right through with the knife and drop it in the stock pot.

That's good economical cooking.

So what we have here is about 12 ounces to close to a pound of tomato and putting this in there.

And with that we are putting that beautiful red, usually they're a bit smaller than that, torpedo onions, so called.

You can see torpedo wider shape of it.

And we want to cut some of that, about five, six ounces of onion in there.

And as I say, I would conventionally leave it all if the onion is a bit smaller than that.

So here we have that onion that we put with it, classic accompaniment, red onion and tomato.

I can feel them but it's okay.

And parsley.

Now, the parsley that I'm putting it, flat leaf parsley, as you can see here, is not only for decoration, it is also for taste.

Now, this is very high in vitamin C, also usually vegetable which are very dark green or deep yellow are high in vitamin A, you know, and that's very good here.

So you see, basically that's what you do.

You could use a curly parley, but this one I think is more flavorful this way.

So with this, we're going to do a dressing here.

And the dressing is very simple.

I'm using a bit of a, remember I haven't put any salt here.

Freshly ground paper, a lot of paper actually, a bit of white wine vinegar.

And I have about two tablespoon, at the most, of white wine vinegar.

And about three, four tablespoon, maybe at the most, of olive oil in there.

And I put a little bit of Lea & Perrins sauce here, which is the Worcestershire sauce, about half a teaspoon of salt.

That give me quite a lot of bitter taste.

Basically that's what we want to do to season our salad here.

I will have more acidity in that salad.

But the first thing, I want to toss this in, season it because it can get slightly wilted, especially for the onion.

You know, it will have a better taste.

Here we are, look how beautiful it is.

And with this we are putting orange, preferably seedless orange.

And what you want to do here is to cut the cap of the orange using a sharp, thin knife, and cut that, as you see, in one stroke, removing not only the top part of the skin but the white cottony part underneath that we call the pith, you know, P-I-T-H.

Okay, here, what we have here, you want to cut that into slice.

You could also toss that into your salad.

But frankly it's a bit better to put it around because it tends to break down.

And we put this all around for the color.

Absolutely gorgeous, as you can see, very fresh looking, fresh taste.

You know, and this would be for me a great start for the type of meal that we are going to do, just for the taste more than the color.

But the taste is very important.

So what we do with this, I'm going to serve that.

You can serve it, of course, bring it, serve it by itself, or then serve a little portion.

You know, what you would want to do is to serve a slice of the orange, probably underneath, or maybe even two slice of the orange.

And serve your salad right on top of it with a nice crunchy concrete type of bread, you know.

And with that first course, now let's move to the second course.

That is the main course, which is the Ossobuco.

And the Ossobuco, as the name imply, also means bone in Italian.

And buco means hole or mouth sometimes.

So this is the shank of the veal.

And as you can see, you cut with your knife here all around that central bone.

And after that you have to use a saw, but frankly, you know, you ask the butcher, the butcher do it with the electric saw and cut it into those pieces.

There is no fat around.

This is very gelatinous and very good for skewing, the best in my opinion.

You have the bone still in the center.

A piece of meat like that is approximately 10 ounces.

But remember that you will have at least half of it meat, half of it bone, you know, and that's perfectly fine.

So what we have now, you want to put them flat, how I have put those here and there, and brown them a good 10, 12 minute on each side.

Look how beautiful those are browning now.

They have been browning for a while.

You can notice, for example, that this one has much more bone to a certain extent, than meat.

But on the other end, this one probably more meat than bone.

So you have to divide it, it's going to be a bit different.

Give this one to the one who doesn't have a good appetite.

Give the big one to me.

I will eat the whole thing, you know.

So we have this in there now, and what we want to do is to put the different vegetable here with that.

As you can see I have leek here.

Those are tiny small leek, but it's fine.

I have one medium leek or two small one like this.

And notice that I'm using basically all of the green from the leek.

You know, there is nothing wasted.

I don't like to cut all the greener from the leek.

Most of it is eatable and it give you the proper color.

With that I have an onion here, which again is going to be cut coarsely.

You don't have to worry too much, quarter of an inch, those things are going to cook a long time.

So the type of stew, you know, very kind of flavory.

You remember that the raw meat here, as I say, would give you about three ounces of cooked meat.

So the amount of cholesterol and fat that you have in that dish is relatively minimal.

So I have all of those vegetables here.

I have carrot.

Carrot will give me some sweetness, some crunchiness, and also a beautiful color.

So again, the carrot is going to be cut into little dice just like the onion and the rest of it.

Here we are, have plenty vegetable in there.

I have in addition to just celery here an Herbs de Provence.

I mean, if you can look at that very close, you will notice that there is small purple flowers, and those are lavender flowers that we have in the Herbs de Provence sometimes.

Now here I have garlic, and I'm slicing the garlic very fine here.

You can chop the garlic also.

It's going to be a bit less pungent if you do it this way.

And the celery.

So all of those vegetables are going to go with the meat here.

To give you a beautiful color.

After the meat has been browned nicely on both sides, as you know I just turned the other one, so it should really brown a little more on the bottom.

But that tell you how to do it.

You know, the Herbs de Provence here.

And finally we want to put our liquid, and what I have here is a little bit of water.

You will put there about, well, half a cup, maybe two third of a cup of water, at the most, and approximately the same amount of wine.

You know, a dry white wine that we have, a dry fruity type of wine.

It can go from a cabernet to a sauvignon blanc.

Any of those will be perfectly fine.

And that basically all, I put a dash of salt on top of this here, of course.

I put some at the beginning, and this is basically what you want to do to start.

Then you cover it.

That has to cook for an hour and a half.

And as you can see, this one has been cooking for an hour and a half to the second seasoning.

I can see it's pretty tender now.

The second set of vegetables that I'm putting in there, we are putting some orange and lemon rind that I have here, as well as tomato, you know.

So what I'm going to do, you can use one of those, You can use one of those, which is a zester, if you want, to do those long strip here of zest that you can put in it, is perfectly fine.

Or you can use one of those grater to actually grate it directly on top of it.

Watch for your knuckle, because it can hurt you, make you bleed.

So you want to be careful, grate it this way, same thing with the lemon.

And those citrus fruit, orange and lemon, are going to add a very vibrant, very fresh flavor to it, you know, at the end.

So you go all around a little more maybe than what I have here, bang it this way.

For the one that you have between the teeth here, just bang it this way.

You can use a little brush also, it will get rid of that.

This will go directly again in our Ossobuco.

I can actually put it directly with the tomato, because the tomato are going to go in there now.

So you would want to put that more at the end as I'm putting here.

And this now has to come back to a boil.

And cook for another five minute or so, while to develop a little bit of flavor.

I can again cover this here, which would be the proper way.

This one, actually you've seen it, we don't need it.

It's here.

So now, while this is coming back to a boil, I wanna show you how to do the rice, the classic rice, which we are going to do with it.

It's done very simply with, usually Italian are going to do it with an arborio rice, which is a round rice from Piedmont, the north part of Italy, which is the classic rice to make a risotto, you know, and it's very good, actually.

So in there we'll use something similar, a dash of butter, a little bit of oil.

And what I have here actually is a small rice also, about the same side.

That's a brown American rice, short grain, very round.

You see slightly greenish thing.

This is a bit more, it has a lot of roughage in this, a lot of crunch because it is a brown rice.

What I have in there is the onion.

So I'll start to sort a little bit of chopped onion.

And with this, the brown rice, I have some thyme leaves that I'm going to put in it too.

I can actually put them directly on top of my rice, and a bit of saffron.

Now, the saffron, as you can see here, I have one ounce of saffron here.

One ounce is a lot.

And an ounce of saffron can go from wholesale, approximately $30, one of those, to up to $60, one of those.

So you have to know the price of those things.

But what we use here is like a teaspoon, the most, maybe a teaspoon and a half too.

And those are actually the stigma or the pistil of flowers of crocuses.

And you need 40,000 crocuses to do a pound of saffron.

And this is one of the reasons it's expensive.

So I have here all my stuff which I want to mix in there.

I have the rice, the onion, rather.

So now I put my rice, saffron, thyme and so forth.

I'm gonna put a little bit of salt in there.

And chicken stock.

Now, the chicken stock is twice, two and a half, sometimes, the amount of your rice, it depend on the type of rice.

The brown rice will tend to take a little more liquid than the white rice, you know.

So now what you do, you stir it occasionally, and until it come to a boil, then you cover it.

While this is coming back to a boil, what we are going to do is to finish our Ossobuco.

And I have the Ossobuco here, which now is boiling nicely as you can see.

And what I want to do is to thicken it just lightly.

And actually I have a little bit of potato starch here, and the potato starch that I have here, I can put like a teaspoon.

Some people may not even want to thicken it.

What I do actually is to put a little bit of water or white wine.

Actually we have white wine in here.

Why not put a dash of white wine in there too?

And you thicken it.

Stir it.

The starch has to be diluted with liquid, otherwise the protein will coagulate as you put it in something hot, and you end up having (mumbles) dumpling all over the place, which you don't want.

So you can see that theoretically you take that off the heat.

I'm going to shut my heat a little bit, because as this touch the liquid, it will thicken on contact.

So you pour a little bit, you thicken, and you look whether you like it or not.

Put a dash more, stir it, and do so forth.

So this is the way of thickening, and I think that I have enough thickening like that.

You bring it back to a boil, and that's basically it.

You always want to taste for seasoning.

I think it's delicious.

So what we are going to do, now this is close to coming back to a boil.

I have one here that I want to show to you, which has been already cooked.

It has that beautiful yellow color that the saffron is going to give to this.

And into this I want to mix a little bit of Parmesan cheese, at the end, about three.

I have two, three tablespoon here, which we want to stir directly into this.

And we are basically ready to serve our Ossobuco now.

So what I have, I have the beautiful platter.

You want to put your rice, and when you serve a rice are the garnish.

Oops, I mess up the kitchen.

My wife doesn't let me in the kitchen anymore.

So what you want to do is to pour all of it in the middle.

Don't worry because the center is going to be covered.

And from the center you start extending it on the outside, this way to create a kind of a column, if you want, a kind of a rim all around.

And with this now, I'm gonna move it a little bit this way.

I can serve directly my Ossobuco here.

So you can see it's totally beautiful.

Maybe I'll show that side.

The bone is smaller here.

And another piece here.

I have four piece of Ossobuco.

I may put only three on top of it, because my tray may be a bit too small for that.

The next one, you can serve it directly on your plate.

Serve the sauce all around, the extra sauce, serve it on the side, the rice is going to absorb it.

And if you want to be a bit fancier, put a little bit of basil on top, just break it and put it directly on top of it.

And this is our beautiful Ossobuco for today.

What better finish for our great meal for special friend than a trifle, that British concoction of pound cake and clotted cream and berries?

However, we're going to do it with a twist here.

Instead of the clotted cream, we're going to use yogurt.

Yogurt doesn't really have the same taste, but the way we're going to do it, we're going to do a yogurt cheese.

I have a 16-ounce a pound of yogurt here.

And what you want to do is to put it into that fine strainer.

If the strainer is very double mesh fine like that, you can put it directly in there.

But I would probably advise to put a paper towel or a coffee filter, and you leave it overnight in your refrigerator and you should get half of it whey, half of it cottage cheese, you know, fairly thick.

Remember that a cup of nonfat yogurt is about 120 calories.

A cup of sour cream is like 490 calories.

A cup of heavy cream is 830, and a cup of mayonnaise or butter, about 1,600 calories.

So big difference.

So here, as you can see, I have a cup of whey, actually, that whey, you can also eat it if you want or drink it.

I like it myself.

And what I do here is just to empty this in there, you can press the filter.

I put this one into a filter.

You can see that the thickness of it approximate about the clotted cream or cream cheese, you know, if you are not quite cream cheese but very between cream cheese and sour cream.

So what we are going to do here very simply is laying down different trifle.

Now, we put some pound cake, but the pound cake that we are going to do, cut thin slice here of pound cake, like quarter of an inch thin.

And with a cookie cutter, we can do little shape like this.

We'll use everything, the creaming as well.

We'll use actually one ounce of pound cake (mumbles) So it's not much.

In that particular one, what you do here, put a piece of plastic wrap in there, put your piece of pound cake in the bottom.

I have an espresso coffee here.

Here I'm going to put a little bit on top, just to mark that type of thing.

Then you put a little bit of your sour cream in there, or yogurt.

Then the berry, you know, eight, 10 berry.

Then that is when you use your trimming, put the trimming on top of it.

You can embed them, push them a little bit in there.

A little more coffee, again, to really soak the thing with it.

And what else do we have?

Yes, a bit more yogurt.

More berry.

And you finally finish up, you know, with a piece of pound cake, one of the round one like this.

And again, finish also with your coffee right on top.

The thick which work perfectly fine here.

You bring that back on top of it here.

I could put it in the refrigerator to keep it cold.

If you want to keep it warm, you can do the same thing.

You know, in a thing like that, I don't have to do the whole thing for you, but you realize what you're doing there by putting a little bit of this, a bit of yogurt.

This is layering it in a beautiful glass like that.

It's very nice, and you keep doing it.

A bit more pound cake, a bit more thing, to layer it to do a nice finish there.

What we wanna do with that is a sauce.

And the sauce is very simple.

I have apricot preserve here.

The apricot preserve.

I put some orange juice in it, you know, to dilute it a little bit.

And some diced nectarine, you know, to give it a bit of color.

And if you want a bit of richness, a little dash of cognac in there.

Cognac is always good, I love cognac.

If you don't want to put any alcohol in it, it's perfectly fine.

It'd be fine with another alcohol of your choice.

In any case, our sauce is finished now.

You can serve your sauce, of course, in a beautiful bowl like this, as I have here, directly at the table, or serve it on your dessert.

What I have here, I have a couple of one which are done, which have been in the refrigerator for a while, which I wanted to show you.

So what you have here, you can actually unmold this one.

See, you can even unmold the one that I just did, because you can lift it up.

It's encased in there, there is no problem.

So, you can turn this upside down this way.

Lift it up gently.

You can see the apricot, or you can see the coffee here on top.

We want probably put a little bit of the sauce all around, which looks absolutely beautiful.

This one has been done in the same glass that I have here.

And again, you may want to serve that at the table or put a little bit of the sauce on top.

And if you feel even a bit richer, serve it with a few more berry on the side here and there, for color, as well as here.

And this is the beautiful trifle, our dessert today.

Now when you cook for special friend, you want to take your time.

You don't cook like that every day, but occasionally taking your time in the kitchen to cook for a friend, it is great.

This is what I have done today.

Cooking a very Mediterranean type of meal with a chewy type of rice.

We have still a lot of colorful dishes in our menu, a lot of taste for sure, starting with that beautiful salad of orange and red onion, torpedo and so forth.

And then going our Ossobuco with the chewy rice around.

And finally, you know, you finish with, you can have a salad in between.

Usually we always have a salad and bread.

Of course, we cannot eat without bread, and Italians eat as much bread practically as the French too.

And finally, our dessert, which is more British, but in that sense, very elegant and I think very satisfying.

With this, of course, don't skimp on the wine.

You want to have a very good wine.

And today do I have a Barolo, and the Barolo from Piedmont, the north part of Italy, they have some of the greatest wine of Italy, and from the Nebbiolo, the Nebbiolo grapes.

This is a very pungent, very high in berry, very fulfilling wine.

And I'm sure your friends are really going to love it.

Maybe you tell them to bring the wine and you do the food.

I hope you enjoy my cooking today.

I enjoy making it for you.

Happy cooking.