- An unusual way to use caper for all the, you know, make sure that you wash it carefully, you drain it carefully and make it dry.

Put it into your fryer a couple of minutes, you fry your caper in there, and this makes a new quite different odor.

Sometimes, a different technique opens new door and new flavors.

I'm Jacques Pepin.

This is "Fast Food My Way".

Happy cooking.

I already think better when I have a glass of wine.

And usually, when I think about menu, I do have a glass of wine.

And the menu that we're going to do today is one of my great menu of the summer is certainly the lobster roll.

Next to me, to my house in Connecticut, there is a little place called the Clam Shack, and they do those lobster roll the whole summer, they close during the winter, and it's kind of a rite of summer to have that for lunch.

So I'm going to do one of those for you and serve that on a nice spinach salad.

And after that, a quick lamb stew.

It's taking lamb from the leg in a very lean lamb and sauteed rare with all kind of different vegetable.

And finally, a small berry custard of a dessert with some raspberry and strawberry on top.

Summer again, time to get to work.

We'll start with the lobster roll.

And the lobster roll, I have it here.

Though the split roll that's sometime here apparently, it's called Downeast split.

In New York often, that will go Philadelphia roll.

And though of course, you brown nicely in butter on each side.

So this is the classic, well, it's the hotdog roll, but it's the classic roll for the lobster.

So I'm going to have a little bit of butter in there.

And I want butter for flavor, all of the lobster.

I have a good half a pan of lobster here and we are going to add some shallots to it.

This is a large shallot, you know, and I want about a couple of tablespoon of this.

(chopping board tapping) That's it.

Sounds good.

About two, three tablespoon here.

So the same amount of scallion.

Mm, sometime, I bring it up this way easier.

We want to saute this and season the lobster with this.

Now here, as you can see, I have two tail, two lobster.

I have half a pound of meat.

So those lobster, we are probably close to a pound each.

Usually full summer, the lobster you get one to four.

Upon lobster, four ounce of meat that stand out if the lobster is full.

You can see that this one with a female 'cause there is the roe, that red thing is the roe.

And you can poach your lobster yourself or they do most of the time.

But very often, you have a specialty market or good supermarket, you have access to fresh crab meat or fresh lobster, and that's a great dish to do this way.

I have the (indistinct) here, and of course, all the pieces, just cut the whole thing into good half-inch, one-inch pieces, you know.

And I'm going up to season it with this.

(pan sizzling) Here we are.

That's it, cooked enough.

My lobster actually, you know, you could do a salad like that and have it just as is.

It'd be very good.

Always clean up after yourself, what my wife says.

Okay.

Salt and pepper.

I could even have a little bit of lemon juice in there.

Be good.

That's it.

And then we're gonna stuff the lobster roll.

I think I'm going to take the small one here with Philadelphia roll.

Okay, so they are split up already when you buy them.

So I'm gonna divide my meat to have it in each of those.

Let's see how much I'm going to be able to put in there first.

One.

I may have a bit too much in the first one.

Okay, let's see here.

I really want to stuff it deep into the lobster, into the roll, rather.

It could this way, it will be even better when it's roasted either on the skillet or in the oven.

In the oven, it makes it easier even.

Okay, I have my half a pound of lobster, meaning that I have eight ounces of lobster, two lobster.

So I have about two ounces of lobster per person here.

I really want to push it into it and stuff it as much as I can.

Now on top of this, I wanna put a little bit of butter here and butter on the other side.

And that we put them directly to cook in this about 400-degree oven.

You know, you can prepare those ahead, actually have them even in the refrigerator and have them put them in the oven when you're ready, when you have guests.

This will take about 10 minutes.

To the lamb stew.

And the lamb stew, I have different vegetable in it, which I'm going to cut, to cook first.

You can buy that fennel, cut the end of it.

It come with those beautiful leaf, which are very anise kind of flavor.

What I'm going to do, in fact, is to keep a little bit of that, maybe to put other garnish on top of my stew for the decoration.

And this, we can use that in stock or you can braise it as well.

This one is going to be saute pretty fast.

And to slice it, I want it to be sliced very, very thin.

What I do when it's sliced thin like this, sometime I put a dash of salt on top of it, even a little bit of sugar.

I let it marinate and I do a salad out of this, and that's very good, same technique.

Now one of the best way of doing it, it's with those so-called mandoline, you know, which goes like this.

This is, you're supposed to grab the thing here to prevent from cutting yourself.

You can do it when it's big like that, holding it this way.

And as you can see, you know, this is really going to be very, very thin.

You know, it's beautifully thin, and that's what you want.

Now you can do the same thing with that one, yeah.

And I need about a good cup of it here, so that's more than enough that I have here.

Those are very handy type of things, you know.

So we'll put that in there.

I add water with it, like half a cup.

(water sizzling) A good half a cup of water.

Okay.

And I'm going to put onion in there.

So here is the onion, about half a cup of onion as well, you know, finely chopped.

Doesn't have to be that fine, actually.

(chopping board tapping) Okay, that's about half a cup.

Okay, I see that.

Here, mushroom.

So that's what I'm doing here.

It could be sliced or diced.

So I have onion there, the fennel.

I'm gonna put salt, pepper in there, and the garlic.

So maybe four clove of garlic like this, that would be good.

Crush it and just coarsely chop it.

(chopping board thumping) Okay.

This and tomato.

Little beautiful hothouse tomato with about one inch.

They're going to render some juice as well, you know.

This way.

So I'm just getting the vegetable to sweat a little bit and to soften, you know, can do it this way as well.

All right.

I think I have all of my vegetable there.

And this will take a couple of minutes, you know, to cook, or for five minute.

And now the lamb.

Now I have a very, very lean lamb here.

Usually from the back leg, you know, what we call the gigot or the back leg.

And as you see, this is lean, relatively inexpensive.

I mean compared to the rack or thing like this.

And we are going to saute it at rare.

So you want it lean, and the butcher can do it for you, or you can buy a leg of lamb, a piece and trim it of fat and cut it, or buy lamb stew maybe this way.

We see that this is going very well, almost cooked.

I'm going to move it here, goes faster.

And we're going to saute that with a bit of oil and butter.

So this.

This.

This is a stew but a different type of stew because it is not braised, it's done at the last minute.

You know, it's an instant stew.

So it's done rare like you would do a, you know, a lamb chop and so forth.

So salt, pepper on it.

You don't put salt and pepper before you're ready to cook it because it would bleed the meat.

We want that really hot.

So we want to saute it.

Okay.

You can see now when the foam kind of disappear like this, that's really getting hot and that's what you want there.

This happened to be a no-stick pan, but another pan would go fine too.

You want to put that into one layer, you know.

Okay.

I have about two pound of meat here.

Yeah, about two pound of meat for four people.

That's about eight ounces, which is more than enough.

Okay, so that will cook three or four minutes on each side.

I'm gonna rinse my finger.

Okay, and one of the garnish that we have with it, which we do in the south of France also is actually bread.

This is a leftover bread, you know, kind of country bread too and some almond.

You know, we put that other garnish on top, and to use it, you know I use that all the time, that kind of mixture.

Sometime on top of it here, I put some Herbes de Provence, you know, Italian seasoning, a little bit of olive oil.

You can put different seasoning, you can put the nut or no nuts, you know, and use that on top of salad, on top of soup, on top of stew.

I use this all the time.

You use it this way or then you wanna crush it like this.

(chopping board thumping) So remember when you have leftover bread, don't throw it out.

You do something like that.

Keep that in your refrigerator.

You serve soup, you put it on top.

Salad, you put it on top.

You do vegetable, you put it on top too.

So here we are.

Now let's see my lamb here.

(pan sizzling) I can see that it's nicely brown, yeah.

I can see that.

Mm.

So you realize also now that that meat should be quite lean.

You know, you don't want to have fat in it because it's going to be served, as I say kind of rare or medium rare.

(pan continues sizzling) For that, you would have to do it in the large skillet to have one layer and with the highest amount of heat that you can get, you know?

Okay, that's brown on both side, that's pretty good.

Let's see that now.

You can see that there's almost no liquid left.

I think it's time.

I'm going to leave it up and to evaporate a bit of the liquid still.

And another garish that we're going to put in there is black kalamata olive, capers, and chive on top.

So I'm gonna cut a little bit of chive.

I have chives in my garden.

You know, they come back every year and get bigger and bigger.

The tarragon come back every year.

Depend where you live, of course, in the country, but those are anywhere.

In that case, as you can see, I'm carrying it pretty coarse.

Sometimes, I cut it very fine.

Sometimes, course here depending what I want to do with it.

Okay.

Well, you know, I can grab one of those.

I can feel it.

I can even grab one like this, cut it open.

To you, it's very rare still in the center, but you can see the outside of the meat here is gray.

The inside of the meat is very red.

If I let it rest two, three minutes, which I'm going to do, the whole thing will be pink 'cause the outside of the meat here has been shrink because of the heat.

It shrink itself and the juice is pushed toward the center.

When it relax, the whole thing will get pink.

Mm, very good.

So I'm putting that in there with whatever juice I have left in there will go there too.

(pan continues sizzling) And then put my olive, maybe I'll put the capers on top.

Now you don't want to boil this that long because boiling, it is going to toughen the meat.

You know, so it's rare.

So you do that at the last moment.

If you're not ready to serve, don't mix those things together.

Okay.

A big stew for four.

Could easily be for six, you know.

That's stew.

Now let me clean up my mess a little bit around, then capers on top.

Chives for all the color there.

All the color and all the taste.

And of course, my secret ingredient there, you know, which make it crunchy.

You can serve more of that on the plate, you know, because this is going to be very crunchy around and it's nice.

Okay, a bit here, a bit there, and we are ready to serve.

Beautiful, fast, quick lamb stew.

Okay, I'm sure my lobster roll are ready now.

Let's get them out of the oven.

Yep.

(oven door thuds) Beautifully brown, all lobster roll there.

We'll do a bit of a salad with it.

You know, we can do a mesclun salad, or Roman salad would be good, but in that case, just baby spinach, you know.

And the baby spinach, I don't want to dress it ahead because it's going to get wilted very, very fast.

So there, I put cracked pepper, dash of salt on top of it, a little bit of lemon juice, you know, citric acid, and you want a great olive oil on that.

Let's serve the salad this way, at least for two.

(bowl taps) That's it.

Let's see.

It is brown on each side.

Nicely brown.

What I do there, you can serve them up there, but I like to trim the outer bit, cut them in two, and then in two again, and then we present them this way, you know.

A lobster roll, stuffed lobster roll, stuffed with lobster.

Okay.

It's a different way certainly of presenting your lobster roll, and you're going to be a big hit with that one.

So tidbit of lobster roll, you know, on the salad.

And now I think we're ready to make the dessert.

Creme patissiere, the pastry cream, which is classic in cooking.

I have a cup and a quarter of half and half here.

Two eggs, and often, this is the way I separate eggs.

I break the eggs in something and I separate my eggs after, and I have no white around.

Most people will separate the eggs from one half shell to the other half shell, and about a third of the egg white stay around the yolk and in the shell.

So we mix yolk and sugar first.

All right.

If you leave that yolk on top of the sugar, it will burn.

The yolk will be burned by the sugar.

So you have to stir it to that extent.

If you were to do this with that, it would be creme anglaise, that is English custard cream.

The addition of starch make it pastry cream.

This.

A dash of vanilla there, pure vanilla extract.

And then I have my milk boiling.

So I put the milk directly in there.

You don't have to go slowly to pour the whole thing in there.

Stir it so the whole thing is diluted, and then you bring it back to a boil.

If it were a creme anglaise, that is the custard cream, the one without the flour, you would never come to a boil.

If you come back to a boil, you have scrambled eggs.

But by putting the starch in it, then it will stabilize the cream.

And as soon as it comes to a boil, it's fine.

You can see how thick it get now, now it's boiling?

That's all there is to it.

You can let it cool off.

And I have one here, the same one actually, which I did a little while ago, which is cooled off.

So it's cold and it get a little thicker, of course, when it's cold.

So that's my pastry cream.

I just put that directly in those beautiful little mold here and we'll put the berry on top.

So we'll cut on the work of having to do a dough, and also on the calorie of it, you know.

So try not to mess up my beautiful custard here.

Should have about three, four tablespoon per person here of this.

And of course, you can have any type.

I do that in dessert.

This is a kind of dessert which is ideal year round because you do the same thing.

And in winter, you put slice of mango in it, or orange for that matter, or banana for that matter.

Any of those food, even some dry fruit in the center.

All of that is very nice.

And in full summer, of course, you use the bounty of the summer.

And finally, you know, we finish that up with a little bit of raspberry, seedless raspberry preserve.

As you can see that seedless raspberry preserve is nice and smooth for the simple reason that I put the whole jar, not with the tub.

Without the tub, I put it into the microwave oven for like 30, 40 seconds, and it just melted nicely and I can glaze the top.

This eventually will mix with the creme patissiere, you know, the pastry cream underneath, and make something quite nice.

Okay.

You can serve that with a nice cookie, you know, (indistinct).

And usually, you would want to serve, I mean use seedless raspberry preserve.

Maybe let's put one of those on top.

Need a little bit of decoration there, maybe here.

Mm, one of those, why not?

Don't eat it.

Just give a bit of color.

Okay.

So here, we have nice, small, elegant dessert that we have here.

And of course, I serve that with a shortbread.

That's very good, any cookie will work.

And with our menu today, I think a little bit of merlot.

This is a merlot from Napa, which happened to be very full, very vibrant, very blackberry-like.

It's going to be great with that lamb.

As you can see, I cut a couple of the pieces of lamb to show you how rare it is inside.

That's the way it should be.

Remember, that lamb has been cooked two, three minutes on each side.

So it's a nice and quick lamb stew.

So remember, with supermarket, if you prep cook, you get your lamb there, you get your berry, you get your lobster roll done.

So the supermarket, being your (indistinct) cook, use it, makes life easier.

Happy cooking.

(light music continues)