- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

Sometimes I have so much to do that it seems like the world is spinning.

These are the times when I want nothing more than to cook an easy and satisfying dinner and have a peaceful ending to the day.

There is nothing better than a soup.

And today we'll make a hearty nourishing starter, with potato, cabbage, sausage, real comfort food for busy people, Fricadelles, or meat patties, and I make them with ground turkey and vegetables, in a sauce of mushroom and tomato.

For dessert, we'll make grapefruit and kiwi mixed with Grand Marnier and a sweet Sauternes wine.

You don't need hours in the kitchen to make a satisfying, wholesome meal.

Join me for a relaxing and delicious dinner on Today's Gourmet.

(gentle nostalgic music) (upbeat jazz music) (upbeat jazz music continues) (upbeat jazz music continues) It is always nice, you know, to sit with the family for dinner, especially in the middle of the week when things are getting hectic and all that.

And what better than to sit around than a soup, you know, a real winter type of dish, a whole meal dish.

And that's what we're going to do today.

I have a beautiful cabbage.

Those are the Savoy cabbage, you know, with curly leaves.

You can use a regular white cabbage also.

I have onion.

I have scallions.

You could use leek.

Potato, of course.

And we're going to flavor that with sausage here.

And I have a sausage meat, which is, you can buy that at the market.

Just buy your sausage and break them into pieces like this.

Of course the sausage are more calories.

There is no question about it.

And if you want to cut down a little bit, you can maybe cut down on half.

I have eight ounces of sausage here.

Put only half of it, or to that matter, you know, you can even eliminate it if you really want to cut it down.

Another thing that you can do too is to use leftovers, which is really what the good cooks used to do.

You know, if you have a roast, a piece of something leftover, that's what you cut it into pieces.

So the meat in a sense here becomes like a flavoring agent, you know, rather than too much meat.

And as I say, this one is fairly seasoned.

So what we're going to have here is the potato.

The potato, as you see, I keep them in water after they've been washed so that they don't discolor and we can put them in pieces or slice them.

Either way they're going to work because it's a type of chunky type of soup here that we want to do.

I love potato, of course in soup or anything else.

Potatoes are very good for you.

You know, people think that potatoes are very high in calories.

They are relatively small in calories, unless you cover them, of course, with butter, oil and so forth.

And very high in potassium.

People always think potassium, banana.

Well, your potato is almost twice as much as the banana, you know, in potassium.

So, use potato.

Here we have here the onion.

Maybe a bit more onion.

Onion is very good for you too.

And the scallions.

Now that scallion here hasn't been cleaned.

I cut the end of it.

You see the root and maybe the first leaf.

If this you find is a bit too dark or a bit damaged, cut the end of it, and this is it.

Now we want to cut that coarsely.

And all of that is going to go in the soup.

We can start with this, the potato, the scallions.

I should probably cook my sausage a bit longer, you know?

I wanna cook it a bit longer so that all the fat is rendered and it's nice and kind of crunchy and crisp, you know?

So this is, you can saute your vegetables slightly in there.

Then our cabbage.

You can use even the core of the cabbage, you know?

This sometimes is a bit tougher, but for a soup, if I cook it a long time, I may cut the end of it.

But this, cut it into smaller pieces because it's tougher, but use it.

You see, the cruciferous vegetable, cabbage is very good.

All the cruciferous vegetable is very good for the intestine, it's good for cancer.

All of those types of cabbage family, from cauliflowers to cabbage to broccoli rabe and so forth.

As you can see, this is a very simple soup.

If you want to put stock in it, you can, but it's really not necessary.

What we're going to put here is plain water.

You have plenty of taste with everything in it and it's the type of thing you can do ahead.

The more you reheat it, the better it is, you know.

And use your leftovers here.

A dash of salt.

Take into consideration that your sausage may be salted, so you may want to put a bit less.

Bring that to a boil.

This has to cook for a good 45 minutes to an hour.

And I have one here which has been cooking, as we can see, and I'm going to ladle it in there.

That's all you would want to do.

Leave it chunky like this, you know.

Sometimes, if you want to puree it, you could puree it.

But this is my favorite when it's in that shape, you know.

You have a few croutons around this and maybe a couple of sprigs of fresh parsley, if you want, on top, for more green.

And this is it.

I'm going to do a recipe now using ice.

Ice and turkey.

And it is a recipe that my wife, or a variation of what she did a few months ago, I thought interesting.

I have some ice here.

But first of course I want to cook some vegetables.

We're going to mix vegetable and turkey meat in a type of patty, you know.

And I have shredded carrot here.

I have half a cup of water in the bottom of this, no salt or anything.

And I'm going to put that to cook.

I will keep the juice which comes out of those vegetables.

So that should cook for like a minute or so, just to get it a little soft.

And I'm gonna put spinach with this.

I have a bunch of spinach here.

It's nice and clean.

Those are young, tender spinach.

And I'm going to cut them a little bit because they may be a bit too large to mix with the meat, you know?

Okay.

So this, this should really cook maybe a bit longer, one or two minutes to soften the carrot.

I cut those carrots with a shredder, you know, one of those thing that you shred cheese with it on the, you can do it very thin actually, you can take a vegetable peeler and take little strips out of it and do the same effect.

So after it cooks for like a minute, then I put my spinach, and that again, the spinach will get wilted very fast.

That will give me, you know, the spinach, all of those are good vegetables, good for your nutrition, to mix it into the meat.

And it give a lot of color to it.

Not only taste, color, it's good for you.

So let that cook a couple of minutes more just to get it wilted.

And what I'm going to do is to mix this with the turkey here.

As you can see, I have ground turkey, and that ground turkey is very, very lean because here we're talking about the breast of turkey.

I'm putting an egg in it and I'm putting ice.

Usually when you do that type of thing that we call a mousse, you know, we emulsify that in a processor, we put cream in it.

I'm not putting cream, I'm putting ice here.

What is the reason of ice?

You know, the reason of ice will make it spongy and nice.

Have you ever heard of a mousse of beef with ice in it?

I always ask people and they always say, "No, I've never had it."

Yes, most people have had it.

We call that frankfurters here.

And your frankfurter, you know, is made with ground beef and ice in it.

If you didn't put ice in your frankfurter, then they would be hard, you know, like a meatball without anything in it, just the plain meat.

The ice makes it nice, elastic and all that, and of course there is no calories.

Why ice?

Because it has to be cold.

It is the albumin, which is holding everything, and the albumin needs to be cold.

If it gets warm then the whole thing gets lop.

So now this is cooked enough.

I'm gonna put this in there and press it a little bit, because remember, I have about half a cup of liquid here and that half a cup of liquid, I want to use it in my sauce later.

The vegetables should be cold, you know.

So what I'm going to do is to spread them out here.

Usually you would do that ahead.

I wanna spread them out, because they should be cold when they get into the patty.

You can put them in the freezer for a few minutes.

But here I don't have time so I'm not going to do that.

And what I will do, however, is to start that skillet for the patty here.

So this will come right here.

And now let's do our patty.

In a food processor, of course, it's very good.

The ice is there.

What you want to do, I want to crush the ice.

I put it into a plastic bag here.

And you don't have to crush the ice, but basically you may damage your processor a little bit.

So this is why I crushed it.

The turkey, I have like a pound of turkey, I have no seasoning in it.

And as I said, this is a very, very lean meat, you know, and turkey is good for that.

The ice, I mean, I have about, in the recipe, four or five tablespoons of ice here.

And we emulsify it together.

The ice being very cold, it will tighten the meat, make it cold and make the albumin hold, you know?

Okay, we'll let it turn.

Then add the egg.

(processor whirring) A bit of salt and pepper.

(processor whirring) A lot of ground pepper.

You know, notice that I put the salt at the end.

The salt, sodium, will tighten the albumin and tighten the mixture.

When you do any type of mousse, the salt should go at the end.

It's very good too.

So what I'll do here is to put that mousse, and I can see that it's very elastic.

So this is a good mixture.

That mixture, I could do what we call quenelles with that, which are little dumplings, and I could do little dumplings and those dumplings, put them in a soup or do them one thing or another with it.

I could do a type of pate with this.

You know?

Here we are.

Very lean.

And I can see, just the texture of it, you know, telling me that it's pretty good.

The texture is elastic, you know?

Okay.

However, here I should really have this colder than what it is.

It's not particularly nice to put it, wet in it.

What I would do also is, before putting it, get a little more of the juice out of it.

I don't want to dilute that too much.

Remember I'm keeping all of that juice.

I have all the vitamins, nutrients in there.

I'm keeping that to put in the sauce.

So here we are here.

Mixing that together.

This I can keep.

And that will go.

Now, I did that for four, and this is four kind of generous portions.

You can see I have a beautiful color here.

You know, the color of the vegetables and so forth will go well with it.

Okay.

And then we form our patty here.

And the patty, you can form them by hand.

You can even use little pieces of plastic wrap or plastic if you want to put them in there directly and form there into a nice shape here, you know?

Just like that.

Or just do it by hand.

See this is not going to stick to your hand.

It's fine.

Though we have four patties that you do here.

Be sure after that to wash your hands, because we are dealing with poultry here.

And I think it's a good idea to clean up your hands.

See, I have four quite large, I had a pound, so that gives me four ounces of very clean meat, and with the vegetable in it.

So that's about it for this.

What we are going to do now is to put that to cook.

So I have a skillet here, which now should be hot enough.

You want to cook it in there, gently, about three, four minutes on one side.

And about three, four minutes on the other side.

And in between you may even cover it, you know?

So I have a little bit of olive oil and that's what we are going to do here.

And while this is cooking, we're going to make a sauce with that.

And that's what I have here.

A little tray for my sauce.

This, remember, I will also put in the sauce.

And a sauce pan right here.

So what I have in there, a little bit of olive oil, again, or peanut oil, any type of oil.

I tend to use, you know, different types of oil.

The onion, I'm gonna chop a little bit of onion first to put in there.

I use a great deal of onion at home.

Onion, garlic, the type of things we use a lot.

You know, sometimes when you do the mousse, as I have done here, you may have heard more of the mousse made with fish.

And with the fish it's fine.

With the fish, you would not be able to put ice in it.

There is not enough albumin in the fish.

The texture of the fish itself is not strong enough to accommodate the ice.

But the meat will.

And as I was saying before, if you do it with lamb, and finally, if you do it with beef, like frankfurters, then you put more and more.

I have tomato here and this is just plain diced tomato.

This is a tomato sauce, remember.

We cut it in dice.

We don't really have to, we're not removing the seed or anything from the tomato here.

That kind of rough, nice tomato, homemade tomato, and mushroom, garlic.

I'm going to chop a little bit of garlic in there, maybe right here.

Crush the garlic, again, to release the essential oil.

I don't have to chop that garlic that thin because it's going to cook for a while.

Okay, this is cooking.

Now, I want to put the mushrooms in it.

And those mushrooms were just washed.

I washed them at the last moment, you know?

It's not that you don't wash mushrooms, but at the last moment you wash them.

See, you have different types of mushrooms.

Often people will tell you, or you're being told to buy button mushrooms, very tight, you know?

It's fine.

But I tell you the mushrooms which are open are older specimens, they are ripe, and they have much more taste.

And they are usually less expensive.

Often I buy my mushrooms on the leftover vegetable rack in the supermarket for half the price and I end up getting something better to taste, you know?

Okay.

This, saute a couple of minutes.

Now, what we want to do is to add our tomato, just plain tomato.

The mushroom with it.

I could put the mushroom a bit later, actually.

I have plenty.

The juice, remember, the juice from the carrots and all that, that will give me a bit of moisture to serve the sauce with.

A dash of salt and pepper.

And that's it, is about all we're going to put in there.

I'm going to cover that.

Let it cook.

And that should cook about 10 minutes or so, you know?

With that, now, let's see what, (meat sizzling) our patties are, they're beautiful.

You know, as you can see, on each side.

I mean, you want that to cook, you know, this is a type of meat that you cook well done.

But it doesn't mean that it has to be dehydrated.

You let it cook well done, as long as it reaches at least 160 degrees internal temperature.

Everything will be killed at 160.

So now we cover it.

I lowered the heat.

And I'm going to move to show you how to do a nice dessert now.

And what I have here, I have a whole bunch of different fruit, and I'm going to start with a grapefruit here.

I have a beautiful grapefruit.

And those are the pink ruby, so-called.

And what I will do is to take the skin out of it.

And as you can see, thick skin, and I go with my knife in a kind of jigsaw fashion, cutting all around, so that my grapefruit is totally clean, you know, that it's totally nude.

Now, before, I'm holding the thing with the skin here, before I continue with that, I'm gonna rinse my hands, because I was working with the turkey.

And I'll put a little bit of soap.

I think it's a good idea to wash your hands when you work with poultry, you know?

Okay.

Now, this is totally clean, as you can see.

Now we want to take the segments out of it.

What you do, you cut on the first one to remove the segment in-between.

And then you go next to the next segment and you turn your knife around to bring it back up.

In that case here I have a pit.

You see?

You try to get them pitless.

Again, you lift it up.

Each time, you lift it up next to the next segment.

This is the proper technique to do oranges, to do grapefruit, to do any of the citrus fruits, you know, that you may want.

Like if you Duck a l'Orange or stuff like this, this is what you would want to do.

And now look what happened here.

I've taken the whole thing out.

All I have is the segments in-between.

I press out the juice.

And all I have left is this, you know?

And this is what we're going to mix in there.

We have this.

I have a little more here.

And we want to put, for the color and also the taste, you know, I'm putting some kiwi here, you know?

And the kiwi, very simply, what we do is to peel it.

You know, the kiwi is very good.

It's part of the gooseberry family, you know?

In Nouvelle cuisine it was probably used a bit too much.

So it got maligned, but it is good.

Beautiful color also.

A bit astringent, you know?

And we're going to mix that with some, some sweet wine, you know?

Occasionally I cook with sweet wine or some alcohol.

Of course if you don't wanna cook with alcohol, put a bit of lemon juice.

Actually you have enough with the juice from the grapefruit and it'd be perfectly fine, you know.

So here, we put that in there.

And I wanna put a dash of Grand Marnier.

The Grand Marnier, of course, is a brandy with an emulsion of orange, very strong.

And we put a sweet wine here.

I have an interesting wine from Corsica here, a sweet Muscat from Corsica.

Here I have a Sauternes, and the Sauternes, of course, is from the Bordeaux area of France, a very sweet wine.

And we're going to open that bottle.

This is a great bottle opener.

And you can keep it in your pocket.

This is, put that at the end, you push this in there and then with your hand you can go around, start coming up.

As soon as it's three-quarters of the way up, you go back the other way and you take it out, you know.

So this is good.

A little bit of, this is a Botrytized wine, so-called, what we call in France pourriture noble, that is the noble rot, when there is a certain bacteria which attacks the grape, you know, and gives you, and dries the grape out.

And by drying the grape out, it concentrate the juice, you know, into the grape itself.

It's a very concentrated wine, which is expensive, of course, but well worth it.

So this is are very simple, elegant dessert, you know, that you have here, very refreshing in full summer.

I can put a cherry on top of that.

And actually, you know, what I could put also is a decoration, look at what I have here.

This is actually a grapefruit, you know, it's a mint grapefruit.

And that would be ideal, of course, for what I'm doing today since I'm doing grapefruit.

And that give a little bit of flair, you know, to your dessert.

And now let's see whether our, (lid clatters) (meat sizzles) our patties are ready.

And I think they are.

Let's see about our tomato sauce here.

Tomato sauce is beautiful.

See, it's a fallacy to think that tomato sauce has to cook for hours and hours.

It gets bitter, you know, that's what it does.

So what we're going to have here, put a couple of patties right here.

Just put the four of them.

And the sauce right on top of it, or around, you know, actually, it's so pretty that I could leave the sauce around.

But this is, have that with a crunchy French bread, you know, that'd be terrific.

Look at that.

There's two patties here.

I can even decorate that with maybe a bit of our fresh, we have some fresh thyme here.

We have all kinds of beautiful herbs.

I put that right on top of it, here and there.

And this is our main course in the menu.

You may think that this is a very elegant dinner for a midweek dinner in the middle of the week.

But, you know, it works out this way.

Very often you have ordinary food, or what I may call ordinary food, and you put it into beautiful silverware.

You bring a bottle of wine.

You put the tablecloth.

And all that changes the type of cuisine that we are doing.

We talk about country food or home food, I can have the same dishes, you know, put in a plain bowl and sitting in the kitchen.

My wife and I can eat that.

That's country food.

By the time I put it in those types of dishes, beautiful and all that, that become kind of bourgeois or very, you know, guest type of food, you know, a bit more elegant.

And by the time I open a bottle of wine and if I put a tie on and if we get dressed and if we put beautiful flowers on the table, we are getting into old cuisine.

So very often, you know, you have to look at your food this way.

Likewise with the dessert, usually we don't have dessert at home.

We may finish with a fruit.

Well, today we have a fruit dessert.

But very often the fact of bringing a dessert to a normal meal brings it to another level of sophistication.

One way or the other, you know, you have to remember that whether you sit in the kitchen with your wife or your kid or in the dining room, it's always great to eat at home together.

Sit down, it's a time to discuss things, and get things together.

And we always do that at my house.

When my mother comes, as well as when my daughter comes, when she was like three years old, she used to come home and tell my wife, "What's for dinner, Mom?"

And my wife would say, "Food."

Now she's 24 years old, and when she asks, "What's for dinner?

", we still say, "Food."

And the type of food we have today, we have that beautiful soup.

Like you can see here, this is very earthy.

It could be a whole meal in itself, you know, for winter and all that.

And now we have the turkey fricadelle here.

We call it fricadelle, it's a turkey patty.

Remember, very lean.

There is an egg and there is ice in it.

It's very spongy and elastic.

It's very nice.

And with the sauce, particularly that sauce of fresh tomato, you know, and mushroom with it, you know, it goes very well with it, that'd be great.

And after that, a salad.

We already have a salad.

We have a kind of mixed salad here with a lot of things in it.

Plain salad is perfectly fine also.

I love salad with any of my meals.

And of course, the dessert.

The dessert here, we put the sweet wine, you know, the Botrytized, that is the Sauternes or Muscadelle, those kinds of very sweet wine, which goes well with it.

You don't cook with those wines.

Those wines will tend to get yellow in cooking.

So they are to be served and drink and just have.

If you don't want to put the wine in it, it's perfectly fine.

You can also put, port wine would be very terrific also.

That will make a nice dessert addition to your menu.

And with this, we want to serve, of course, a glass of wine.

I have a wine from the Northeast part of France here.

This is a Pinot blanc.

One of the only parts of France, actually, where the varietal, that is the name of the grape, is actually written on the bottle.

So the Pinot blanc, we say blanc in French, we say blanc, with the C, in the United States, is a very fruity, light, delicate wine, without any pretensions, you know, the type of wine which will go very well with a family dinner.

I enjoyed cooking it for you.

I hope you're going to cook it for your family.

You're going to sit down together, enjoy it.

Happy cooking.

(gentle piano music)