- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

- And I'm Claudine Pepin.

Summertime is the perfect time to relax, chill out, and smell the roses.

- It's also the perfect time to cook great summer foods like corn, mushroom, and peaches.

- True, but who wants to slave over a hot stove on a summer day?

- Well, Lou says you have to.

Today we are going to make a spectacular summer dinner without even breaking a sweat.

We start with chilled mushroom pate with two sauce.

- [Claudine] Grilled pork tenderloin gets its flavor from a sweet, spicy marinade.

Eggplant ragu, seasoned with herbs and garlic, is delicious, hot or cold.

- [Jacques] I'll show you how to make a quick and easy corn pan bread to serve on the side.

And for dessert, peaches baked with almonds, they are like the sweet fragrance of a salmonoid.

- So basically, the secret to staying cool is to do a lot ahead of time, use the grill, and serve things at room temperature.

- You're a fast learner, Titin.

Ready to start cooking?

- No sweat.

Join us for a relaxing summer supper, next on Jacques Pepin's Kitchen.

- Encore with Claudine.

- Hi.

Today we are making a relaxing summer supper and we're starting with a pate of mushrooms with a tomatillo sauce.

Or you can make it with a vinaigrette sauce with tomatoes in it.

- [Jacques] So here as you see, the big portobello mushroom.

I got some shiitake, remember you do shiitake?

- [Claudine] Oh, yeah.

- [Jacques] Remove those, the stem.

The stem is really tough here.

- [Claudine] Okay.

- We have oyster mushroom, we have the regular button mushroom, cream in it.

But I do that in the summer.

I use at least 10, 15 different type of mushroom because I go pick them up myself.

But any mushroom you find, even one type, it's okay.

So this here, you cook them, and a lot of the juice come out of the mushroom.

As you see here, there is no seasoning of anything in there.

If you don't have enough juice coming out of it, put a little bit of water.

In any case, this has been cooking about 10, 15 minutes.

Here, I'm gonna drain them out.

And basically I should have half a cup of juice here, you see?

- [Claudine] Oh wow.

- My mushroom are there, and the juice, which I'm going to put there.

You know what we're going to put?

I have about the right amount here.

We're going to put some gelatin on top of this.

- Oh.

- And I use a tablespoon of gelatin.

And a tablespoon used to be a number of years ago, one envelope used to be a tablespoon of gelatin.

Now, they didn't raise the price, but they took some from the inside.

So now one envelope of gelatin is two teaspoon.

So you sprinkle it on top and it's going to moisten.

See, I put a bit of olive oil in there.

There is nothing remember in this, I have to put some seasoning.

Scallion.

We put scallion in there.

(oil sizzling) Let me put a little bit of garlic in there.

(board banging) I am not trying to scare you, I'm just... (board tapping) Okay.

A bit of garlic.

(oil sizzling) - Is that enough shallot?

- Yes.

I'm (indistinct).

- [Claudine] Come on, I'm doing really fast.

- Okay.

It's almost style of carrot.

- Is that us?

- Yeah, right.

Okay.

But you can put onion or whatever.

So let's saute that for a minute or so.

(pan clanking) (oil sizzling) And what we are going to do in there, we're going to put about half a cup of mushroom.

All of that is going to go into the food processor, make a puree out of this.

- Okay.

- You have more juice here, which I put again there.

All right.

And now I can see whether that thing is from a bit of a crust on top of it, you know?

Okay.

It's melting, so pretty soon.

This doesn't have to cook long.

A dash of Tabasco in there.

(oil sizzling) Salt, pepper.

Remember I don't have any seasoning here.

Dash of pepper.

And we put that in the food processor.

You're ready for me?

- I'm ready with the food processor.

- All right.

Okay.

Here we are.

Here.

This is going to be the bathe of the pate.

You know, something very simple and quite good, especially when you have a lot of mushroom, as we do in summer.

- Do I put the gelatin in here now too?

- Yeah.

Yeah, I'm gonna give it to you.

Right here.

Okay.

(bowl clanking) Good.

- [Claudine] Here we go.

(processor whirring) Make the puree.

(processor whirring) That's fine.

You can give it back to me in there.

And I'll put my mushroom here.

Okay.

Good.

Let's see.

You wanna take all the stuff out of it.

And you know what?

We're going to need that for one of the sauce, so maybe you should just rinse that- - Okay.

- Under water.

Just a small rinse, doesn't really.

- Okay.

- While I'm mixing this together.

(water splashing) And then we put that in those little pate mold, those are half cup egg mold or pate mold or souffle mold, you know.

You wanna put a little piece of plastic wrap on top so it doesn't dry out.

- Okay.

- And put that into- - The refrigerator.

- The refrigerator.

- So you want to do that?

I'll let you do this.

- Okay.

- Get in the refrigerator.

- And I'll get the cold ones.

- Good.

And with this, we are going to do two different types of sauce.

We're going to do a sauce with a tomatillo here.

And the tomatillo is part of the gooseberry family.

They have those small one now, come from the South Africa, tiny one.

- Here is the cold- - Oh, here they are.

- Do you want me to just leave them here or?

- See?

That's hard.

Yeah, leave them here.

We'll unmold them in a little while.

Let's do the sauce first.

And I'll cut that directly in there.

See, this is like an unripe tomato and it's used a great deal in Western cooking, you know.

- Tomatillo.

- Half waxed.

Cut that one.

I'll give you a piece of onion.

Right in there.

That's about enough.

So this is a raw sauce, you know.

Then we put some cilantro in there.

I love cilantro this way.

I give you a little bit of garlic, a couple of clove of garlic.

Well, and a little bit of Anaheim pepper.

Well, a piece like that should be more than enough.

- Ooh.

- Well, I'm not going to use the seed, just pieces like this.

Okay, Claudine.

(indistinct) - Oh, a dash of sugar.

Dash of sugar, dash of salt, dash of pepper, okay.

(food processor whirring) And with this, I can put water, maybe.

(food processor whirring) If need be.

(food processor whirring) - That's it.

- That's it.

Ooh, that looks beautiful.

- [Jacques] Nice sauce, huh?

- Yeah, tasteful.

- Okay, so that we put in there.

And we're going to do a tomato sauce in there, so.

(food processor clanking) - I'll rinse again.

- You think you should run this out again?

- Here we go.

- [Jacques] Okay, maybe you should.

Thank you.

- You're welcome.

Okay.

- Okay.

- Here.

- Okay, I'll put a tomato in there.

- Oil?

- We're gonna put olive oil, put a little bit of mustard.

- [Claudine] Olive oil.

Is that enough?

- Oh, no, no, no.

It's like a vinaigrette, you know.

- Oh, okay.

- So you wanna put enough.

- Okay.

- Salt also.

What?

My salt is here.

- [Claudine] No, don't put any sugar in there.

- That's more than enough.

- Always.

- This.

- That helps.

(laughing) - Yeah.

It helps if you put the knife on it.

And we may have a little more.

- Here we go.

(food processor whirring) - Okay, that's fine.

- Ooh.

- We can always add a little bit.

This is a fast sauce also.

- Very (indistinct).

- And this is also very good with a poached fish or something like this, you know.

Okay, here we are.

Okay, I'm going to unmold one, and I'd like you to unmold the other.

I'll take one.

And I'll show you what I do.

You put your knife straight down like this.

Watch out there you don't go inside, you're really for the side.

And you don't move your knife, you just move the container.

- Okay.

- Like this.

That's good.

You put it upside down.

Put your two thumb on top of it.

- And push?

- And shake it.

Yes.

- Oh, okay.

- Make it come down.

(indistinct) Yeah.

Put the knife like that.

Your two thumb.

- Oh, I felt it.

- You felt it?

- Yeah.

- Okay, so it's down.

- Oh, I hope I'm right.

Yeah, most of it.

- Okay, that's good.

So now- - That's not bad.

- Put a little bit of the red sauce against you.

Mine is with the green sauce.

A little piece of parsley maybe here.

Put a bit of parsley in this one too, or cilantro.

And that's it.

This is our pate of mushroom with tomatillo sauce or with tomato vinaigrette.

And our main course is going to be a grilled marinated pork fillet.

You see that beautiful pork fillet?

- Yeah.

- You know, this has about the same amount of fat than a chicken breast without the skin.

I'm taking the silver skin here and a little bit of this.

I'd like you to do the marinade.

- Okay, I know it needs ginger.

- So you put a little bit of ginger in there.

You wanna scrape with the back of a knife you can use, or a spoon as you're doing.

So I'm going to have a jalapeno pepper.

This is hot one.

I have red jalapeno pepper, I have Anaheim, and those are pasilla pepper, which become ancho pepper when you dry them out, right?

We have so many pepper and I don't know anything about it, or not much.

There is a lot to know about it.

Okay, that's- You can cut those pieces directly in there, you know?

- Okay.

But I don't need a lot, right?

I just need like this little knob?

- That should be about fine.

- Good.

- What I wanna show you here, I'll cut this.

You cut that all around your- the central rib, you know.

That basically more than 50% of the hotness is going to be in the rib.

- Oh, really?

- And in the- - I know in the seeds.

- So you take some out of it.

Yeah, the seed, put that in there.

You're ready for this?

- Yeah.

I can cut- - I can cut it for you here.

- Okay.

- Put some clove of garlic.

Two, three cloves of garlic.

I give you a bit of honey here.

Tablespoon of honey.

- [Claudine] Thank you.

- And you can put a little bit of water in there.

- I was excited to put the nouc mam in there because I like it.

- And put the nouc mam.

A couple of tablespoon of nouc mam.

The nouc mam is the fish sauce which is very famous in Vietnamese cooking.

And this is really a sauce to deep in, you know, in Vietnamese cooking.

- Ready?

- Go ahead.

(food processor whirring) That's fine, that's fine.

But what you do, you put that into a plastic bag because you can marinate it for a- you should marinate it for a few hours.

Here, can put that directly thing there.

Good.

- [Claudine] Ooh, it's nice and green.

- Yeah, it will give taste.

And this as I say, you should close it fine like that and marinate it.

Of course we don't have time to marinate it, I'm going to use it right away, just pretending that it's been marinating for a few hours.

- I won't tell on.

- We want clean them up like this.

Put that here.

Put a little bit of oil on top of it.

- Do we wanna save the sauce?

- [Jacques] Oh, absolutely, Claudine.

- [Claudine] Okay.

- The sauce, we are going to keep it back in the marinade after.

- Oh.

- Do this.

You don't need any salt in this.

Remember that the nouc mam is very salted, you know?

And this one here, if we keep the fillet after it's cooked in there, I would bring that to a boil, because if you keep it in there, in the room, it was in there, it should really come to a boil.

We can discard this now.

- Okay.

- So we bring that to a boil.

These has to cook six to eight minute, I would say.

- All right.

- On each side.

Okay?

- So what's next?

- What's next, we're going to do a ragu of eggplant, you know.

A type of eggplant ragu.

- I love eggplant.

- And you see I have an eggplant here, which is about, you can use Japanese, Chinese eggplant, or the regular one here.

See that, I bought a pound and a half, and that's what you want.

- [Claudine] Okay.

- Now I give it to you.

- Thank you.

- Because what you do here- Yeah, that's right, put it in here.

- Oh.

- You put it in there.

You put it this way, you wrap it nicely.

And that's all you do, you put that in the oven for like an hour.

That's it.

- Just like this?

- That's what I have here.

- Okay.

- When I was at the Russian tea room in New York, you know, we used to do a poor man's caviar.

The poor man's caviar is the center of this.

See, this is very tender now.

And you use the center of this.

- Oh wow.

- So we are going to use this, but first let's saute the onion first.

And I want you to slice some garlic here.

You slice some garlic here.

- Slice some garlic.

- Very tiny one.

(chopping board clanking) (chuckles) I heard the noise.

You remember the music?

- Yeah.

I just don't know the words.

- You forget the word.

Okay, onion.

(chopping board clanking) Here we are.

(oil sizzling) And this has to cook for a little while, about four, five minutes before you put your eggplant in it.

Okay.

Here we are.

Put the ear of the padrons.

And what I'm going to do- - You gonna turn that?

- Yes.

I may look at it on the other side.

(meat sizzling) This is a nice grill, you know.

Look at that.

Nice and hot, you know.

- That looks really nice.

- Okay, let me reduce the heat.

The grill, a little bit later on.

(food sizzling) So this- yeah, we'll cook a couple of minutes.

I'm going to cover it.

And while this is cooking, what do we do next?

- [Claudine] Cornbread.

- That's a good idea.

What do we have here?

- We have corn.

- [Jacques] Yeah.

Can you put it in there.

- Okay, we have flour.

- Okay.

- And we have corn meal.

- Okay.

- And we need - - Who is next?

- One tablespoon of- - Baking powder?

- Baking powder.

Yeah.

- Okay.

And we need an egg.

- [Claudine] How's that?

- Yep.

- Okay.

- There's an egg.

We need a dash of sugar, put a dash of salt in there.

A dash of pepper, and milk.

What you want to do, you see when you do a batter, you want to put about half of the liquid.

You know why?

- Why?

- If you put all of the liquid, it get wet and you may have lump all over the place.

If you put only a little bit of the liquid, it get to the type of texture that I have here, with a very thick texture, you see?

So when you have a thick texture like this, the thread of the whisk will make everything loose, you know?

And now you can put the rest of it very gently and it's not going to lump.

- Can I mix?

- You continue mixing, during that time I'll take the kernel out of this.

(maize squelching) Okay.

I'm gonna cut that directly on this here, you see.

- Okay, then I'll stop.

- [Jacques] See the way I cut with the knife?

- [Claudine] Yes.

- Okay, I'll let you finish that.

I'm gonna start putting a little bit of oil in there.

- This is what all the bad people do.

- Mix it together.

Yeah.

(food sizzling) A little bit of oil in this, and I'm gonna be ready for you to bring me that batter here.

- [Claudine] Okay.

- [Jacques] Soon.

- [Claudine] Here.

- Thank you.

So I'll put the batter directly in there.

And we wanna cook it on top of the stove for a couple of minutes.

Here we are.

- [Claudine] Give me.

- Thank you, Claudine.

- You're welcome.

- You're a nice cleaner offer.

- Thank you.

- Okay, so now here it is.

You know those- you see the way it's cooked.

That's a nice way of cooking your eggplant for that matter, because eggplant is like a sponge.

It use an enormous amount of oil, you know?

- [Claudine] Oh.

- So when you carry it this way.

- Okay.

Yeah, I've noticed that if I ever do eggplant stove top, I feel, ugh, it does.

- A lot of oil.

Let's put this in there.

(food sizzling) This.

(food sizzling) That has to cook a few more minutes.

You put salt and pepper?

- No, I didn't.

- Okay, how about some ear of the padrons?

Did you put some?

- Yeah, that I put.

I put ear of the padrons.

- Okay, I'm gonna put a little bit of wine.

- [Claudine] Mmh.

(food sizzling) - Lower the heat, cover it and cook that about five minutes.

And during that time, you see the way that thing is moving there?

- [Claudine] Yeah.

- Okay, all we want to do now is to put a little bit of oil on top.

- [Claudine] Oh.

- Like this, you know.

So that it brown nicely.

And then you wanna put that in the oven.

You wanna put that in the oven.

- Pate now?

- Yeah.

Yeah, of course pate now, you know.

But gonna take about like 30, 35 minutes, depending on- - But you're gonna have to open the door for me.

- Okay.

- I'm sorry.

- Okay.

- Good.

- And now what?

- And now let me look at, we can shut that off.

I will look at this.

I think it's- should have done on this side beautifully too.

I put it on the third side.

- [Claudine] That looks great.

- So I have another bread here.

You want to get that other bread to see what it looks like.

At that point, this could still cook a few minute.

Eventually, it has to rest.

Either on top of the hot stove or in a low oven.

So which side?

I think we leave the top up.

- Yeah.

- Do you have a serrated edge knife- - [Claudine] I'm sure.

- We could use?

Or even one of those.

It's fine.

- I like this knife anyway.

So, this is the one you're gonna use.

- Oh yes?

- Yes.

- So here, this is a very fast bread, a very easy bread to make, you see.

Now you can cut it, you know, leave it like that at the table.

- Oh, that looks really- it smells really good.

- It's simple, you know.

Okay.

We have this.

Can put that over there.

And I'm going to serve.

I think the eggplant ragu is about ready now.

- Okay.

I'll get you a bowl.

- It's nice.

I know you love eggplant.

- I do.

And this makes much more sense, especially with what you said about the oil.

- Yeah.

There is a minimal amount of oil.

So I'll put a bit of parsley in there.

And I like maybe this time to cut the parsley very coarsely like this.

Now to put on top.

- Oh.

- Okay.

I'm ready for you.

- All right.

- [Jacques] This is a big bowl of eggplant.

- It's a beautiful bowl of eggplant.

- Right.

Now we have here.

- Okay, I'm gonna go set it over there.

- Okay.

Now this is cooked enough now, I believe.

And what you have to do, I would put it back in the marinade that we'll use, it'll render a little bit of juice.

Okay.

Put the lid on like this.

And with the heat, generally it can stay there and rest 10 minute this way.

Let me check the pork now.

- I hope it's ready.

- Yeah.

- [Claudine] Oh.

- You see it has rested and you can see the juice?

- Yeah.

- Next to the marinade.

You know, it render a lot of juice at the myoglobin, which comes out, you know.

Here, give me the knife over there.

- Okay.

- I will look at a piece.

- Here.

- Okay, I'll cut a piece.

You wanna give a platter.

- I'm gonna give you a serving a thing.

And this, a fillet like this, you know, it's plenty for four people.

- [Claudine] Yeah.

- [Jacques] Cut a piece right there.

You see?

And it's still just slightly pink.

There is no fat in it, and that's basically the way you want it.

Okay?

- Sounds good.

- I'll put it like this.

That piece there.

I'm gonna give you some of the juice on top of it.

- Oh, good.

- I hope so.

- Yeah.

Mix the marinade, you know, it's pretty strong, yeah.

I think so.

On top of it here.

- Especially the ginger.

- With the ginger and the jalapeno paper, you know.

So here it is, our grill marinated pork fillet.

And we have the eggplant ragu and the cornbread.

Whether it's summer or not, we're going to have a relaxing summer supper tonight.

And we start with that beautiful little pate of mushroom.

You can have 5, 6, 10 different type of mushroom.

And we have two sauce.

I'm having the tomato vinaigrette, and you're having?

- The tomatillo.

- [Jacques] The tomatillo sauce.

And then?

- [Claudine] The pork with the beautiful marinade.

- [Jacques] Yes.

- [Claudine] And then- - The ragu of eggplant.

Remember we cooked that eggplant in the oven so it doesn't take much fat.

And you love eggplant.

- I love eggplant.

Eggplant is awesome.

And I knew that we were gonna be really busy cooking today, so I made dessert.

- I see that.

- And I made fresh peaches with almonds and maple syrup, a little bit of butter and some water.

In the oven, 400 degrees for about 20 minutes.

- Yeah, it looks good.

It's terrific, yes.

- Really simple.

Really simple.

- And then of course, we have the corn bread.

The pan corn bread.

I know you're gonna make that one, it's easy to make.

- Definitely.

- So what did you choose for wine here?

- Well, I have white wine from the Central Coast, Malvasia Bianca.

- [Jacques] Taste of honey, you know.

That's good.

- [Claudine] And what do you have?

- I have a Chinon.

This is a caviar de France from the Loire Valley in France.

It's very kind of spicy and deep.

The type of wine it remind me of my childhood.

And I'm going to take a little bit of this one.

- I'm gonna take some of this one.

(wine gurgling) - And so put your feet up and relax, summer time.

Anytime is good for a delicious dinner like this.

I hope you'll try making this eclectic meal.

And Claudine, I already love cooking with you.

(glasses clinking) - I love cooking with you too.

Thank you.

- Until next time, happy cooking.

- Happy cooking.

(bright music)