- The secret of keeping your basil green when you do any type of pesto or puree of basil is to blanch it.

Better even you put it in there about three cup of basil.

You put it in the microwave oven for about 30 seconds to blanche it and it's still hot.

And then you put salt in it and you put a little bit of Parmesan cheese.

I put a good dash of pepper, two or three tablespoon full of water.

We process it.

(food processor whirring) You know, a little bit of olive oil inside will of course make it very glossy and rich, which is what we want.

(food processor whirring) And now I have a beautiful deep green puree of basil.

I can serve it other dip this way, use it as a pesto.

Other thing, I mean if you want to be a bit more extravagant, I do little dice of Swiss cheese, a good amount, you know, or, or Gruyère on top of this.

Here that we do a little tablespoon on top of this and this is heaven.

And you don't have to feel guilty because it only took a minute to make.

I'm Jacques Pepin and this is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

(gentle music) (oven door thuds) Yeah.

You know, when you're well organized, a meal at home doesn't really take much longer to do than to wait in line at the food line or at the takeout daily.

So today we're doing (speaking French) which is a (speaking French) with bacon bits, very specific from Leon, where I come from.

We're going to do a spaghetti with raw anchovy sauce with tomato in it.

And we finish with a great chocolate dessert, chocolate rocher with hazelnut, corn flake, and all of that, of course with a little bit of wine, maybe a little bit of Porte with it.

So let's start with the salad.

I cook my bacon in the microwave oven, you know, you cover it with a piece of paper towel and three, four, five minute depending on the side of your bacon.

And it's about the best way of doing it.

My wife taught me how to do this, you know, so this is already the way I do it.

And with the salad we're going to poach eggs.

And I have boiling water here.

In your boiling water, you always want to put a little bit of vinegar.

It helped the albumen egg white to cohere together.

Well, and what you do, you preferably should have cold eggs, but when it's cold, the egg white is constricted, you know, get together.

If it's a room temperature, it tends to go all over the place.

Large eggs, always break your eggs on something flat like that so you don't have the shell getting into the eggs and break it as close as you can to the water.

Now as it come to the water, it come to the top, try to bring back the yolk around the, I mean the white rather around the yolk.

There is another one here.

And the eggs at that point, I mean the water at that point should boil when you start it.

After that you put the eggs in it, the water will get a bit colder and it should not boil again, your eggs should push in about 200 degree water.

So you can lower the heat and occasionally you test your eggs.

It's important at the beginning, as I said, to drag your slotted spoon on top, it make the eggs move so it doesn't stick to the bottom.

After it moves one, then it's not going to stick to the bottom anymore.

You know, the old way, the classic way that we used to do in Leon for eggs, we used to poach eggs, what we call a fried eggs.

And a fried egg is actually an egg, which is fried in oil.

And that's what I have here.

And it's a bit, it's not done much anymore, but I think the last time that I did it was with Julia.

We did those eggs.

So you can do only one at a time here.

So you break it here and break it as close as you can to the oil.

It starts frying right away.

Bring back the white all around the yolk.

That's it.

So this is not like poaching where you can put five, six eggs in your pan.

You can only do one at the time here.

All right?

Like a minute on one side.

And often those would be served with tomato as well, you know, like with a grilled tomato, grilled bacon.

Okay.

So this was the fried eggs that I used to do as a kid.

And the inside of that egg would be basically, you know, all liquid like a poached egg.

That's the proper way of doing it.

Okay, so you check occasionally to see if your eggs is ready, lift it up and you can press with your finger on top of it.

It should be quite soft if you want it to be runny inside.

And the egg that are always placed in cold water, you place them in cold water to wash up the vinegar as well have to cool them off so that you can reheat them whenever you're ready.

So that's one way of doing the egg.

Okay, so now with our salad, we're going to do a dressing and the dressing will be made of garlic, (hand thudding) separate the clove of garlic here and need one good clove of garlic, cut the end of the stem, (knife thudding) crush the garlic, so the flesh will come out easily (knife thudding) and then crush it into a puree.

You want do a nice puree here of garlic.

So this is your classic mustard vinegarette with garlic.

Salt, fair amount of cracked pepper and vinegar, red wine vinegar conventionally, mustard, oh let's put mustard in there.

And of course your olive oil.

And at that point of course the best possible olive oil will make the best possible salad.

That you can do ahead.

I often do that in a jar.

I take a jar, put my mustard in it with the garlic, put everything, shake the jar and take whatever I need and keep the rest in the refrigerator.

Okay, let's taste it.

Always taste.

That's good.

I have the frisée here, and those frisée we have them coming now as you can see the salad is green to start with and when you close, my father used to close this salad or put a flower pot on top of it.

And when it's deprived of photosynthesis of the sun, then it turn white like that inside.

So commercially you trim a little bit of the green if you want.

Those are pretty expensive, but I have some in my garden.

And then you cut them into pieces, fill up with water.

And this of course is the greatest things to clean up your salad.

You even have a break here.

But if you don't do this, it is likely that you'll have three or four or five tables full of water which are mixing with your dressing and that really can kill your dressing, your salad.

Okay.

But now we mix that well.

It's the type of salad that you can even mix a little bit ahead because it tends to be tough, you know?

So here is frisée (speaking French).

Here, yeah, I'm making a mess here.

I don't know if you've noticed, but you can mix the salad in any bowl.

The bowl is never big enough when you mix the salad.

Here we are.

A nefty portion of salad here for our first course.

And the bacon on top that you break into pieces here.

You can also of course do the bacon.

My mother would do the bacon in a skillet, of course microwave oven didn't exist at that point.

Crouton, have some crouton sauteed in olive oil and of course you have your poached eggs.

And the poached eggs, if I took it just, oh it's still lukewarm anyway, just out of the water, you may clean a little bit of the white around and then serve your eggs on top.

And very often even even break your eggs so it runs onto your salad when you serve it.

This is the classic Salad Lyonnaise, you know, the Frisée (speaking French).

(gentle music) And differently than other salad, you usually serve that salad on lukewarm plate and you serve it with a cold wine and usually it's a cold bolgheri.

The bolgheri as you know, is pressed in a different way.

So there is not much tannin in it.

And that's why very often it is served cold, almost like a white wine.

So cold bolgheri on a warm salad plate is a bit unusual.

But this is the way the salad is served in Leon.

With the bolgheri.

Okay, and now we are going to do the spaghetti with the raw anchovy sauce.

And this is something that I do often at home because it's easy to do and I can do it ahead.

I have boiling water here, salted boiling water.

I'm going to put the pound of spaghetti here.

And those are thin spaghetti.

So they will take about seven, eight minutes to do when you put your pasta in here, make sure to spread it out so it doesn't stick together.

Good.

And now you don't have to cover it anymore.

So in that sauce, I'm going to mix together peas and those are frozen baby peas, which have been defrosted.

I have some anchovy filet here that I'm going to about half a can, about five or six anchovy filet.

Cut into small pieces.

I do a bunch of different sauce like this at home.

The most classic maybe, the sauce which is the real pasta primavera from my friend, Ed Joby, the professional panther in New York.

And I think it was 1976 when COU opened Le Coucou in New York, he asked Ed, I was around too, "Do you have a new idea, you know, to do a pasta, very simple that we could do at the restaurant."

And I'd say, well my mother or my grandmother always made that pasta primavera in spring, which was done very simply by cutting tomato.

But I'm going to cut tomato here.

So we cut those tomato and I do that at home when my garden is full of tomato.

One of the recipe we do.

So you cut your tomato into inch dice and you put olive oil on top of it, salt, pepper and that's about it.

And cook the pasta like an olive oil on it of course.

So it's like a tomato salad if you want.

And then the pasta come out, boiling up, he pour it on top of it, toast it and serve it with some cheese and basil on top.

You know, that was a real pasta primavera since then it went into a lot of different variation with all kind of different vegetable.

So it's a little bit of the semi did and this, but this, I keep everything uncooked, raw.

So here I have enough tomato, put it this way.

So cheese, I am going to put some tomato, some flake here, you know, pepper flake, salt, pepper, fair amount of pepper.

And then some garlic.

The garlic, I'm going to crush it too.

(knife thuds) Maybe two cloves of garlic should be more than enough here.

(knife thudding) Okay, and I'll put some herb on top.

In that case I'm going to put some seed on over, of course parsley, basil, anywhere you like would be fine.

And you put your oil in it and a fair amount of oil as you can see.

And you stir this.

And that's it, I do that ahead.

Now you don't want that to be ice cold when you put your pasta in it.

So when I'm ready to serve it, any of those sauce, just when my spaghetti are basically cooked, I throw this in the microwave oven for a couple of minutes.

Not really to cook it but to have it all lukewarm so that it doesn't cool up the pasta so much.

So I'm going to put that in the microwave.

Okay, this should be ready now.

That's it.

Well see, it's lukewarm just the way it should be.

Always take a little bit of the pasta water that I use in there, you know.

Always take like a good half cup, even 3/4 cup of the pasta water.

I mix with a mixture.

Then drain the pasta.

Want to drain it well.

Directly into the mixture here.

Okay.

Probably a little more olive oil on top.

And we can toss this.

Pasta.

I don't know anyone who doesn't like pasta, but it's already the greatest one is done, you know, at the last moment like this.

Except this one, the sauce is done ahead.

So I have some cheese in there already.

I'll put this in a nice beautiful bowl here and maybe with a little bit of extra cheese on top.

That thing is really great to make flake of cheese like this.

I'm going to put a bit of cilantro here.

Doesn't really, really even need it, but I like the taste of cilantro.

So here it is, a spaghetti with raw anchovy sauce.

(gentle music) And I went by my granddaughter come for Christmas, Shorey, this is what I'm known for, Chocolate Rochers with Hazelnuts and Cornflakes.

Of course she makes it with me and she has chocolat all over her face all over the place.

But it's a great, great dish dessert to do.

And very, very easy to do.

I mean make sure you use a very high 70, 80% cocoa butter chocolate.

I use a dark one of course I use milk chocolate as well.

I don't really use white chocolat much because for me I don't really feel it's chocolat, but it's fine with it too.

So what you do, you melt your chocolat, you can melt it on top of hot water.

Sometime, I put it directly in the microwave oven.

Don't cook it too long in the microwave oven because it'll really have a tendency to scotch at 45 second.

Leave it to three minute look around, do it another 30 seconds, Do that a couple of time and it's going to be nice and beautiful.

So here I have roasted hazelnut, I rub them together to remove some of the shell.

But even if some of the shell are on, it's fine.

So you put a little bit of of chocolate here with your hazelnut.

That's it.

There is nothing like hazelnut and chocolate.

And with this, you know, there is simply, you do a little package like this.

I mean certainly for Christmas, this is the type of thing that we do at home.

We do peeled of orange, peeled of grapefruit that we crystallize.

Chocolate truffle, chocolate roches, all of those small dessert that sometime we put in little package with a bow and all that that we give our friend when they come home, you know, when they come for a party or for whatever.

So here is with the hazelnut, right?

Can do it much bigger as you want and that I'll use the same bowl.

I love it with cornflake.

And the cornflake turn out really nice and crunchy too.

So you know, again, your dark chocolate, a bit of mixture.

Don't worry if you break the cornflake a little bit, it's okay.

They still stay very, very crunchy.

You want them to be coated totally with the chocolate and this maybe a little more.

Dash more.

Chocolate is always messy.

All the chocolate pastry chef that I know.

The greatest one Albert Kumin I remember going trout fishing with him coming out of his sky, a chocolate on my butt.

Anywhere you want with him, you chocolate on yourself.

Okay, so here again, you, those large roches that we do with the corn flake, look at that, tell you the kid will love that.

And the adult too actually.

All right.

They can be separated a little bit, spread them uneven, bigger, smaller one.

Totally take no time to do.

All you need is, as I said, a nuts different type of nut this.

A good quality chocolate and here you are.

With that said, you put that in the refrigerator and it'll set up in no time at all.

Another thing that we do there, see the little fancier, you take those little muffin pan like this and inside we roll a little bit of chocolate.

I mean the value may be of a good table- one, two tablespoon of chocolate, cover the bottom.

This can make a finish.

A great finish to a fancy dinner, you know, and into this now, I love to fill those with fresh raspberry, you know, so you set your raspberry in when you see liquid, okay?

Another one.

Now you can do all kind of other things in there as I have here And as you see here, I have sultana raisins, you know the golden resins.

We have macadamia nuts, just really good.

All that will go well with it.

Dry cranberry I have here, that's great too.

You want to gild the lily a little bit, you know, you're going to serve it pretty fast.

You know, we, in a couple of hours we can put a thing of mint in the center of it.

The mint will set in it too.

And the mint and chocolat goes well too.

And that's about it.

It's really not complicated to do and you really impress the neighbor here.

Okay, here we are.

That goes into the refrigerator also.

And when you're ready, you see you can, this will come down very easily.

(paper rustling) You know, from around.

And here we are.

Here we are with this and with this one is dark chocolate.

This a dark chocolate with the roasted hazelnut.

And underneath you have the corn flake.

Here I have almond.

Almond with the milk chocolate, you know, roasted almond as well.

And here I have a rice crispy.

I love rice crispy with it too.

And what's better than chocolate to a nice old vintage Porte that goes so well with it, I'm going to taste it.

Taste the Porte.

Simple dishes quickly prepare means that you can spend more time conversing with family and friend.

Happy cooking.

(gentle music)