- Gloria loves avocado, and I serve it to her often this way, just scooping it out of the avocado itself.

I mix mayonnaise, ketchup, and Tabasco in it, with a little bit of water to make it smoother.

Stir it, coat it right on top of the avocado, a bit of crushed tortilla, a dash of cilantro.

I'm Jacques Pépin.

This is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

The main course of my menu today is going to be a kind of mock cassoulet.

Cassoulet is a very famous dish from the Southwest of France with beans, which does cook for hours.

We're going to do a version here, much easier and much faster.

And I start with some hot Italian sausage that I'm going to start to brown right here.

There's a lot of different type of meat in the cassoulet.

Very often it's done with poultry, also, usually either duck or goose, and then a roast of pork, sometime a roast of lamb, different type of sausage.

And, of course, the beans.

The beans in the cassoulet is really a bean dish from the Southwest of France.

The beans are still there, but we're cutting the poultry out, and we're using sausage, and that piece of ham that you get directly at the market.

This is the ham shoulder type.

What I'm doing, removing a bit of the tough outside here.

I think it's a little bit too tough, and we can leave the piece whole in there, and slice it later on, or then cut it now.

I think I'm going to leave it just like this.

(sausages sizzling) This is going, maybe I'll cut it in half, and put that to brown with my sausage here.

Let's see.

(spoon scraping) Have a little bit of oil in there.

Okay.

First thing you do, you wanna brown that for about five, six minutes, and after that we'll continue with the recipe.

So I'm covering it.

And while it's cooking I'm gonna start a salad because with a cassoulet you always eat a salad.

And today, I'm doing a salad with zucchini, tomato, mozzarella.

I'll start with the zucchini because I wanna do the outside of the salad using zucchini strip like this.

And as you can see, I'm using a vegetable peeler.

I go up to when I almost see the seed, then I turn it on the other side, do the same thing on the other side.

I could have cut the end of it.

That's it.

And, again, on the other side again.

The only thing you don't really want to cut is the center seed, which I have right there.

So I have those nice strip of zucchini here, and I wanna cure those.

So all I put is a little bit of salt on top of it.

That's it, and roll it in the salt and cure it.

I do the same thing with cucumber.

Create with cucumber too, but it's different.

Zucchini is a bit different.

The salt will also soften it, so, the rest of the recipe is tomato.

Taking the stem of the tomato there.

This is nice and ripe tomato, which is what I want.

Cut that in about half-inch to one-inch pieces.

(knife chopping) And, again, here you see, nothing is written in stone.

I'm going to put some mozzarella with it, but if you wanted to put some olives in there, different type of herbs.

Some people may do a salad like that and remove the skin, remove the seed.

It's fine, also, but I don't see the point here.

It's okay this way.

Okay, tomato.

I have a nice mozzarella here, soft.

That's what I like it.

I don't want it too mushy, but I like it soft for that.

Maybe we cut it into pieces slightly smaller than the tomato.

Here we are.

Lemon, roll your lemon to get more juice out of it.

I strain that directly through my finger here.

Salt on top of it.

Freshly ground pepper.

(pepper mill grinding) And olive oil.

Okay, olive oil and a bit of parsley.

We could put chives.

The question of choice.

Question of taste.

Could put tarragon.

I like tarragon, sometime.

And that's about it for my salad here.

That salad could be, of course, served by itself.

I think that I'm going to check on my cassoulet because I can smell that it's going maybe a bit fast.

(sausage and ham sizzling) It's doing fine, and doing beautiful.

So, in fact, I can continue it before I finish my salad.

And what I have here is bratwurst, you know, another type of sausage.

You could use knockwurst, or bratwurst.

This are done sometime with pork, sometime with veal.

In France we serve those type we call Boudin Blanc, a white boudin, we serve around Christmas, and we have truffle in it.

Now you can see I have a lot of sausage here.

We put mushroom.

(sizzling continues) I'm gonna put a bit of thyme leaf.

A couple of bay leaf.

Some garlic and we just crush it.

(knife pounding) You don't really have to chop your garlic, just crush like this.

It'll go right in there.

And maybe some onion.

About half a cup (knife chopping) of onion.

(knife chopping) Here we are.

I wanna stir that a little bit, so that the onion get in the bottom a little bit.

(sizzling continues) Looks good already.

Okay.

I'm gonna continue cooking it now for another seven, eight minute, while I finish the salad going back here.

Now my zucchini is kinda cured, so what you do, you use those little strip of zucchini, and, you know, I can taste when I know.

They are crunchy now and salted, it's very nice, so, you just do a little strip of zucchini around as a garnish.

You know, you can put them in any old way here, but it's a nice design, nice shape.

Mm-hmm.

I have always a lot of zucchini in my garden in summer, and we use zucchini flowers, you know, to do fritter with it.

And we do all kind of thing with the zucchini.

So that goes around.

Put that in the center (spoon clinking) of my zucchini.

That's a really nice, fresh, invigorating salad, you know?

Okay, a sprig of parsley there.

And this is it.

So, I'm gonna go on with our menu and do the first course.

Another little timbale that we call timbale.

Just something together, you know, of smoked salmon.

And that's a very interesting thing that I do for brunch.

My wife love that, too.

And you'll see how easy it is.

I just put some chive there into a little container like this one, you know.

This is one portion, it's great.

So you put it in the bottom.

And put a little bit of cheese about the value of one tablespoon.

Sometime I use cream cheese, but this is goat cheese, I put it there.

Don't worry about pressing it because what you're going to do, I have smoked salmon here, and what we are going to do is actually take a slice of salmon, you know, you can fold it like that to make it fit.

We put it on top and I use the salmon to press it, you know, in place, that's it.

Then what goes with the salmon?

Red onion.

I can cut that by hand, or if you have a beautiful machine like this, which we call a mandoline, we can use it.

There is a guard when it's whole like this, I use my hand.

(mandoline slicing) Going right through, at least to go halfway through.

Then I would use the guard.

And then the same thing with apple.

(mandoline slicing) I wanna put some apple in there.

So here, let me put a piece of apple, a little bit of red onion.

I like to put ground pepper on top of it here.

(pepper mill grinding) I mean, you can see that at that point you could put zucchini, you could put all kind of things in there.

So another piece of smoked salmon.

I think two piece like that should be a nice portion.

That's it.

You know, sometime you do it one way, another time, another way.

Whether you put this one before that one is not that important either, you know.

So here is my onion, nice piece of apple.

We finish a bit more pepper, maybe a dash of salt on there on top of this.

And that's it.

You can cover that with plastic wrap and put that in your refrigerator.

You know, you can see what it looks like.

And maybe I put a bit of chives on top too, and that's it.

You're ready to serve it.

And when you serve it here, what I did, I did a bit of a sauce with cucumber.

And the cucumber, I'm not going to use all of it, just the end of it.

(vegetable peeler slicing) To show you how easy it is.

A little piece of cucumber.

(knife slicing) Cut in half.

I will take probably the seed out using, you know, a teaspoon like this to go on one side to the other side.

Little dice of this.

Actually, I had zucchini before.

I could do dice of zucchini as well, and it will work perfectly fine for this.

Here we are.

(knife chopping) Okay.

Dice of cucumber there.

I have capers.

Those are nice, small capers.

I like the small one better than the big one.

They're a bit more refined.

A dash of salt.

Again, (pepper mill grinding) pepper.

You have to season everything that we do.

And olive oil.

So this is the base.

So, you know, and mold it lightly, and see whether it comes out.

You can always slide a knife on the side, you know, and make it up.

Move it to give a little bit of air.

Then it will come out like a nice little pâté here.

(indistinct) And we have that other garnish all around.

And that makes a very elegant, a very elegant first course, you know.

With a little more, a little more chives around like this.

Wow.

That looks good.

Here we are.

And I wanted to show you that sometime with the same ingredient, you know, you can present things in a different way.

This is usually what professional chefs do.

You know, you take an idea from somewhere, you look at something, and you do it in a totally different way.

And I like to do that, it's a bit challenging.

So our salmon, I serve salmon all the time at home, all the time slightly differently.

And here, a beautiful plate again.

Take your smoked salmon.

I mean, the standout way you buy it cut, or you cut it yourself is really to try to place your salmon.

You know, some people try to do a rose with it, and you can sometime if the slice are large enough, but instead of putting it flat, I like to put the salmon this way in kind of the way it fall.

I mean, the pressure, also, actually.

So I have a bunch of smoked salmon right there, like, this way.

Red onion, I had red onion before.

The red onion is kind of classic here.

So I can take a piece of red onion, and do it very, very thin, you know, with your knife.

(knife chopping) To do a kind of julienne with it, you know.

And you can shred this a little bit all over.

Capers are perfect with smoked salmon.

So I have my capers here, I'm gonna serve.

Take the juice out, some of the capers around, you know, this way.

Chives in the same way.

(knife chopping) That I could serve on top.

And around this would be more of a classic way of serving smoked salmon.

A cucumber, I could use it again in a different way.

A little bit like I did the zucchini.

I could take my smoked salmon doing strip (vegetable peeler slicing) of cucumber this way.

Taking the cucumber together.

And you can do spaghetti with it if you want.

That is, you can serve it like this, but this way rolling it.

(knife chopping) And doing a type of, a type of spaghetti with cucumber.

Add some salt, actually.

Oh, let's put it in the center here.

We're improving here, that's it.

Then I have a little bit of olive oil.

Would always serve it slightly around like this.

And with this it would be classic to serve crouton, you know, or bread.

(knife slicing) And I like to serve it very often this way, you know, in long strip.

(knife slicing) Or maybe three of those.

Now if you really wanna be fancy, then we do a butter roll.

If the temperature is okay on my butter and it is here, I scrape it this way.

and from that moment I let it turn around to create, like, a flowers.

You redo it again and that time you do it very tight to create the center of your flowers.

Cut the piece of it, put that right here, and you have a beautiful rose butter to be served with it.

That's at least $25 now.

You started at $5 and each time you add something else, in the restaurant you upgrade your price.

And with this I always put, and I finish a bit of freshly ground pepper, you know.

And the freshly ground pepper, it's very important, as I said, to ground it like this at the last moment.

This is where you smell the essential oil.

If you have your pepper ground for a month, two month, it burn your mouth, but it doesn't really have any taste at all.

So it's important to have freshly ground pepper.

(ingredients sizzling) (spoon scraping) Nice and brown in the center I can see.

So up to now we have no liquid in it.

So now we're gonna put tomato.

About a cup, cup and a half of tomato.

You can use a canned tomato there as well as the fresh one.

It'd be perfectly fine for this one.

(knife slicing) And our beans.

Here, and I have two kind of beans, you can drain it, but you really don't have to, you have to put more liquid in there anyway.

And this is the large cannellini beans, you know.

I need a bit more water in there.

I can use this.

Rinse it out to finish it up.

(spoon scraping) So the stew is cooking.

This has to come to a boil now.

And simmer gently for about seven, eight, 10 minutes, and then that's basically it.

Serve it in the larger, you see everything there in the large casserole.

A bit of fresh herbs on top.

It's a great dish.

And now we're going to do the dessert for our menu.

This is one of those dessert that I do when guests arrive unexpectedly.

Usually at home we don't really have dessert, but I always have, I have whipped cream cheese, any type of cream cheese, actually.

Orange, and I already have that at home.

So it's one of the desserts that I would do.

Take a little bit of those, (vegetable peeler scraping) those strip like this to flavor your cream cheese.

And we're going to do segment with the orange.

So what you do, I use a very thin, long knife, and you wanna cut.

You can see that those orange have an enormous, I mean.

the side of that skin is enormous, are basically going to have nothing left here.

And the next time then it's going to be different.

And my orange is going to be much larger, but you can see that this one here is not a good deal at the market, I tell you.

I mean, you buy that orange, and you see the side of that orange, and you are left with this.

It's not even a quarter of the original weight.

So that happened.

So let's do at least two orange like this.

You see that, the thicker I cut.

Could do the same dessert with grapefruit.

So we wanna remove the segment here and those segments, you will go between two membrane here, and you have one.

And then the next membrane, you go next to the membrane, twist your knife around, and you'll see that your knife will come back up next to that membrane.

And, again, that's it, 'til you get used to.

That sometime the membrane are very thin.

Sometime they are large.

The idea is to have nice segment of orange without the membrane, you know.

So what I have here, I will use the juice so you don't lose anything.

Okay.

So this.

We have the cream cheese now with the rind of the orange.

We wanna put sugar in there, and work this out with a spatula.

If it's a whipped cream cheese then it's relatively soft, you know, so the flavor (spoon clinking) is only the cream cheese, sugar, rind of orange.

With this, all you wanna do is to serve that directly in your plate here, you know, like this.

And then we wanna garnish that with orange.

A little bit all over the place.

There is not really any rule on this.

You want to give, like, maybe one orange for each of your guests.

That should be plenty here.

And we create a sauce.

The sauce is usually created with the juice of the orange, and a little bit of orange marmalade here.

So we concentrate the same taste in a sense.

(whisk whisking) You mix it together.

Somehow I don't know why I think of that as a British dessert.

I don't know why, but with that in there.

Sometime I put pomegranate seed on top of it, which is beautiful.

If you don't have that, you know, maybe a couple of blueberry will work fine here.

And that end up being a very sophisticated dessert.

A couple of cookie with that, fast, easy dessert.

(pot lid clanking) I'm already in the mood for that type of dish, you know, with ham, with sausage, I love sausage.

And then you can cut nice piece of ham like this, uh-huh.

And then your sausage.

Then look at that, the mushroom.

(soft music) That's it, here we are.

Maybe a bit more juice, a bit of parsley on top.

And with this, a deep, heavy robust wine from the South of France.

Make my dishes for your loved one.

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Happy cooking.