- For that elegant winter soup, I take unsweetened sweet potato puree, enough chicken stock to dilute it.

Salt, pepper, so maybe cream in it.

You serve it right in a beautiful bowl like this.

Some roasted pumpkin seeds on top, a dash of dill and here it is.

I'm Jacques Pepin.

This is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

I am going to braise short ribs today.

Braise it with mushroom with onion and I'm going to do it in a pressure cooker that goes very fast.

And this is often the way my sister-in-law or my mother used to do in France.

We use the pressure cooker a lot.

You know, you come back from work and you wanna do a stew, beans or whatever those takes hours to cook.

So we use the pressure cooker.

For the time being on those short rib, trimming a little bit of the fat there is on the bone.

Also the fact that on the bone, that's where it starts smelling, you know?

So you can smell it.

But basically, it's always good to trim that fat here.

You don't want that in there.

The short ribs are very tender.

This is the first part of the short rib, the first layer that you have on top of your rib here.

Then, there is another layer on top with fat in between and another layer on top, which is really tough.

That's the part that you want, the part which is attached to those bone here.

And the first thing we want to do is to brown that in the pressure cooker a little bit with a dash of oil.

Amusing an oil, this is a canola oil which can go, or grapeseed oil, those oil go to very high temperature, don't have any taste at all.

You wanna brown the meat with a little bit of oil.

If I don't have oil in it, it won't brown properly.

That will take about four, five minutes to brown around, let's say here.

And during that time, I'm going to work on my first course.

And what I'm going to do today is a guacamole.

I love guacamole and a seviche of scallop, a very large scallop.

So maybe I'll start with those scallop, which we call diver scallop here, very large one as you can see.

And you can do that with fish as well.

What you do, you put salt and I put kosher type salt on this here.

And the reason is that the core salt, the kosher type here, is a larger grain, a larger segment than the fine salt.

And it's more planted.

And by being more planted, it'll puncture the fish or the meat in that case, meat, scallop, and draw out the moisture from it, which is the process of curing.

When you cure a prosciutto, for example, you put it in salt, the salt will puncture the meat, draw out the moisture and deprive the bacteria of unnecessary condition.

That the process of curing.

That works better when you do it with that type of coarse salt.

So you know, depending on the side of your scallop, I cut those in about half inch pieces.

I put salt and pepper, you put that directly on top of it here.

That's it, and I say I do an as instant gravlaks like this an instant gravlaks with any type of fish, basically fresh fish.

You can see here I have eight slice out of my two scallop.

A bit more salt on top, a bit more pepper on top, that's it.

Now the time that it takes for the salt to melt and get incorporated into the fish, it will be cured.

I mean I can do that a couple of hours ahead.

I can actually do it overnight even.

But an hour or so, even less than that, it's ready.

So with this, I want to do my famous guacamole.

Claude does guacamole too.

And what we do there, you can cut, be sure that you buy ripe, ripe avocado, you know?

Cut them around and then you twist it.

Oh, I know this.

Then you go break it, that break the seed.

Often people say that you should put the seed right with the mixture of the guacamole to prevent discoloring.

I don't really think that it make that much difference.

I cover it with plastic and it's perfectly fine.

You can remove that in one shot like this, which is good.

But you can do also, sometime when I have a salad gently, because you don't want to go through with your finger, I mean you don't want your knife to go through the skin, but you can cut it this way in square like this when you have sometime a salad and you need square of avocado.

And then, you take it out and it's all cut into square.

It's certainly easy.

And all of this technique, I develop so that I don't dirty the board, I don't dirty anything, my wife is really happy when I cook this way.

Again, I crush it with a fork like this to have it in pieces like this, you know?

I like it in puree, but, we wanna put a little bit of onion.

Finally chopped, you don't wanna put too much onion, about two, three tablespoon here.

Garlic, at least two cloves of garlic depending on the side.

Finally chopped.

We're gonna put scallion in there.

Scallion.

Tomato, I put hot pepper, yeah?

And the hot pepper, you can have all kind of hot pepper.

You can have Serrano, Jalapeño, Habanero, which is even stronger.

This happened to be Poblano and sometimes the Poblano is very mild, but sometimes it's pretty spicy.

This one is pretty spicy.

I'm going to put that piece like this.

You know when you do hot stuff like this, it's purely a question of tolerance.

You know, you like it very hot, you do it.

You don't, you put less.

Okay, here it is.

I'm going to put a tomato in there and I, take the core out of it.

Cut that into little dice.

Have a half a cup, hmm?

I go off a cup of diced tomatoes should be plenty for that.

Here we are.

You can take the seed out of it, but I don't think it's really necessary here.

This, okay, I'm going to put green Tabasco in it.

The green Tabasco, I like the taste of it.

It's not a sharp, it's slightly different than the other, olive oil.

Okay, I wanna put salt in it, a fair amount of salt.

And what else?

Oh lemon.

I wanna put lemon or lime for matter.

You know, lime be perfectly fine.

Press your lime on top here and that's it.

You wanna stir this, measure it, I mean stir it with a spoon, the beautiful color and you know I need cilantro in there.

That's it, that's what I need.

Now some people love cilantro, some hate cilantro.

Cilantro is what's called Chinese parsley or Japanese parsley or coriandre in French or coriander or cilantro.

It's all the same, okay.

Here I have here.

And to serve this, I wanna serve them on that beautiful plate here, putting my guacamole right in the center of it.

Well, maybe a little more on top.

And the scallop, around the scallop, what I say, could have, you know, marinated a little longer but this is fine.

That makes a very elegant dish.

Two three slice of scallop per person would be enough with a large one.

Of course, you want to do a little bit of an extra oil around.

Top of it, I have some tortilla here, different one.

I wanna crush it a little bit to put that on top.

It gives them some really nice crunch around.

You can even have some of those on the outside.

We make it festive, that's it.

Our seviche of scallop with the guacamole.

Whoop, slow down, nice and brown now, really warm then.

Okay, they're going to brown a little more on the other side.

And during that time, I'll prepare the rest of the stew.

I'm going to put onion in there.

Costly cut, you know?

If we bought a cup and a half of onion, this would be, that's it.

Put it in there.

I have a couple of belly here, a large spring of thyme.

Put salt, pepper, those little potato here, you go and you could peel them or leave them like that depending whether you like the skin or not.

Garlic, eat the garlic on the side, and I'm going to take maybe three, four cloves of garlic here.

So it peels well, crush it to peel it.

And we can use the garlic actually just like this, you know?

And now I'm going to use some shiitake mushroom that I have here.

Now look at the difference between one which is totally brown on top like this and another one which is all cracked like those, you know?

Those are winter shiitake mushroom and they are much better quality than those.

They're also more expensive.

So try to get when those are cooked like meat, you know, they are thick and heavy.

What we're gonna do there, it just could break them in half.

We are not soaking them, we are putting them directly into the stew this way.

I really want to get rid of all of the fat, use the lid.

Okay, so now we can add the rest of the ingredient in there.

My mushroom, potato, salt, pepper, and with this now we need liquid.

I'm going to put white wine and a little bit of water.

So a good cup of white wine, keep a little bit for me and a dash of water, a little of a cup of water, okay.

This would take an hour and a half to cook normally.

This will take 30 minutes at the most with this.

And because it's cooked in the pressure cooker, very tight together, it gets very, very moist.

Now you close, there is different type of pressure cooker, mine is closed.

And you see that thing on top here?

There is those red mark here, it has to come to the third mark, which is maximum pressure.

It cannot explode or anything because by the time it reach that temperature, if you don't lower the heat, it starts hissing out.

You know, the pressure is released automatically.

But it should go to that level that when you start timing the 30 minute that we are going to do in that stew.

And I was using that knife and that thing, it needs help.

It's very important to have a sharp knife.

I mean, in the kitchen, it's absolutely essential.

And I wanted to show you a little bit how to sharpen knife.

There is different way of sharpening knife.

People think that this sharpen knife, it does not sharpen knife, what we call a steel, fusil in French.

It only keep knife sharp.

If you look with a microscope to the cutting edge of that knife, it's made of teeth.

Anything which cut is made of teeth from a scalpel to a saw.

So when I use the knife and bang it on the table like this, the teeth get out of whack.

So what you do, you run it on top of this, that realign the teeth.

That's what it does, it does not really sharpen the knife.

After a year or so, there is no more teeth.

So you can use that as much as you want.

It won't do anything.

So you need to have a steel.

You can use one of those electric things also.

This one is pretty good and you, it's good because it has an angle, so you cannot twist your knife.

It comes and it'll run by himself.

One on one side, one on the other side.

You do it a couple of time here, medium.

And then, this is the honing knife to finish it up.

So I do that occasionally with my knife and this is good.

The old way, of course, was to do it with a big stone like I have here.

And this is, if you look at the stone closely, half of it is very fine, the other one is coarse, you know?

So of course, you start it with the coarse side, you know, if your knife need a lot of help, then on the other side.

You need oil on this or water.

You know, you can use water as long as you don't use oil.

By the time you use water, then you cannot go back to oil.

And the oil that you have to use is a mineral oil.

Don't use the olive oil or vegetable oil because you ruin the stone.

So you have to keep your knife about 30-degree angle and run it on top.

You run it against, against the ground, with the ground, doesn't really matter that much.

Notice but you do have to spend time to create a new edge.

And why do you have oil in there or water?

Because look, when I clean that up, you see how dirty that is?

This is the segment of the stone itself or the segment of the knife, which I keep cleaning.

So the stones stay abrasive.

If I don't do that, those segment get incorporated into the stone.

And then, the stone become like a piece of marble.

Everything slide on top of it.

Another thing that is done or that I used to do behind a plate.

Because you see, the plate where the glaze didn't take here, this is a brazing a lot.

This is actually very good.

You know a ceramic sharpener, ceramic on the Rockwell scale is much harder than steel.

It's brittle, it breaks, but it's harder.

So you know the back of a plate like that, you will finish your knife too and impress your neighbors.

Where is the sharp knife?

You know, if you have a very, like this tomato is almost rotten, very soft.

If you have a knife and you can go right through and it cut through the tomato when it's really sharp, I would call that a sharp knife, you know?

And you'll never cut your finger with a sharp knife.

And if you cut your finger, it's a nice, clean cut that heal very fast, very important.

Well, I think my stew is cooked now.

So what you have to do, as you can see, the high pressure is here with those three red line.

This is the maximum pressure.

I don't want it higher than that.

Otherwise, it start hissing on the outside.

When you're ready to, when it's cooked enough, then you have to depressurize it.

There is no way you can open it even if you want to.

So you have to press on this, that relieves the pressure, and that's going to take about a minute and a half, two minute, depending on your pressure cooker for all the steam to be out.

When you have no more noise, then it will open easily.

You know, you don't have to worry that much because you cannot open it really until it's decompressed, you know?

And now you don't have any more noise, okay.

And I can see that there, the reduction here, I can see that my mushroom are really thick, you know, chewy and all that and that's how I like those mushroom.

And this, I'm gonna pull that directly in there with a fair amount of juice, maybe a bit of parsley on top of it.

But I can see now.

I mean this is really, really very tender, you know?

And that's what you want.

So a little bit of green on top and that's it.

We are ready to eat.

(slow gentle bright music) And now, I found a sale certainly.

I have fruit juice rocked.

You put that into the ice cube tray.

And I have a raspberry puree here.

Here I have orange juice, cranberry juice, blackberry, grapefruit and mango.

And all of that are very easy to do.

You just take the fruit juice and freeze them.

A bit more complicated maybe, if you want to with the raspberry, this is defrosted raspberry in its own juice.

There is no sugar in there.

So you put it into the food processor, in the food mill rather.

And to sweeten it, I use a good raspberry jam, that's it.

And then, you put it right to the food mill so that you keep the seed inside.

And that's basically it, you know?

This and those.

Well, I can even use, there is a little pourer here, which is good.

So as you can see, you fill those up.

Actually there is still some seed that went through.

So if you really want it totally seedless, you can put it through a strain there now.

And then I have orange juice, the same idea here, you know, with your orange juice.

Anyway, you get the idea.

That's pretty easy to do and you have so many fruit on the market that you can enjoy doing that with.

I love to serve that with champagne, you know?

And with lady finger I have here, here I have actually a little cube of pancake.

You can cut it this way.

Looks nice, it's a bit different instead of getting sliced, you know?

Question of a- That's it, looks great.

And this has been out, they've been out for a little while because you don't want them too cold, you know?

I mean, too frozen.

So I take them out a little bit ahead and you can see that with your hand, you can push and they just come out easily.

So I have a red one here.

Let's put another red one maybe in that one.

Other color, cranberry juice here.

Blackberry, it's really fun.

And the fruit itself is delicious.

What do I have here?

Grapefruit, grapefruit with biggest orange.

Let's put an orange here, maybe an orange there, and that's it.

You know what to do for mother's day now.

So you serve that, of course.

I have beautiful champagne here.

Okay, turning her around.

Always put your thumb on top in case the thing would come out.

And when you open champagne, hold the cork and move the bottle.

Don't move the cork, move the bottle.

That's it.

A little pop.

And we are ready to pour.

And look at this, the juice are going to melt within your champagne.

Oh, that looks beautiful.

I'm gonna do that for Mother's Day.

I hope my wife does it for Father's Day.

You don't have to wait for a special occasion to have a meal like that.

Do it everyday for your family and happy cooking.