- I love quesadillas and I do it with Monterey Jack cheese with American cheese, Manchego.

Large burrito like this one.

Put the cheese on top, some hot salsa, a bit of Tabasco, dash of salt.

Cilantro.

I love cilantro, so I put a lot on top of it.

You fold it in half and then put it into a large skillet like that.

Brown it one minute and a half or so on one side, the same thing on the other side.

Here you are, a large quesadilla.

Cut it in two.

Slice.

It's a great first course.

I'm Jacques Pepin.

This is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

I'm taking some liberty here with the word tartare.

You know, usually the word tartare is with beef, usually.

You do a tartare of beef, raw beef, and you form it into a type of patty.

Here I'm doing that with tomato, tomato and bread.

You know, it's a nice mixture.

So here I cut the bread.

I have ripe tomato here, and that's what you need for that, More taste.

(speaking in French) here, so called the stem of the tomato, you don't use.

Very often in those recipe, actually, you take the skin out of it, you take the the seed out of it.

But we are not doing that today.

Just cutting it in half.

And you can see, you always cut it perpendicular to the stem to expose the seed.

And whatever seed there is, we are going to, juice, we're going to press it in there, which I don't have really much here.

But we're going to use that juice to make a sauce.

What you do, you strain the rest of this.

And in that cave, you know?

I'm not even throwing this out.

I'm putting the seed back with my bread here.

(glass dings) You don't have to do, but I like the seed as well.

So this we are going to cut into little dice.

(knife tapping) And again, you know, it could be done without the skin, but I don't mind the skin at all.

So don't worry too much about having square tomato which are perfect because, as you see, it's diced, but it's also mushed a little bit.

Especially I pressed on it, you know?

Okay, we have that here.

I wanna put some olive oil in there.

Salt.

You need a fair amount of salt for that.

Pepper.

(pepper grinder whirring) Freshly-ground pepper.

Good.

A bit of onion.

And for that, you know, preferably you would want to use a sweet onion, Vidalia type or a Walla-Walla, Vidalia, or whatever.

An onion without too much... Not too hot, not too strong, you know.

And if you happen not to have that type of onion, and your onion is too strong, after you chop it the way I'm doing it here, very finely, what you could do is to put it into a sieve and rinse it under cold water.

When you do that, you take out the sulfuric acid that you have in your onion.

And this is the sulfuric acid, which tend to discolor the onion, make it turn dark, and sting your eyes, you know?

So you can do that.

Oh, and then I put a little bit of tarragon, since I love tarragon.

I have it fresh in the garden the whole summer.

Tarragon is great because if you plant it in your garden, if it like the spot, it come here after year and get bigger and bigger.

So it's a nice plant to have.

And I think it was James Beard, one day, which was asked about cannibalism.

And I think he said, "If there is enough tarragon around, I'll go for it."

So he loved tarragon.

Okay, here is my tartare is ready here.

So now we wanna do a sauce with this with the juice.

I put a dash of salt in there.

Again, pepper.

And if I don't have enough juice, and I don't think I have enough juice, then I can always add a little bit of tomato juice or V8.

You know, one of those things is great.

And we wanna do a slight emulsion with the olive oil here.

(whisk rattling) That's a nice sauce.

And the olive oil emulsify nicely here.

So that's it.

Now what we wanna do is to prepare the tartare.

So we can do that, as I say, ahead, but you probably would want to put it together at the last moment.

I'm using a can here, can of food like this.

But anything round like this, you will use it to create a shape.

Now if you don't do that, it's fine too.

You can just plant that in the middle.

Okay.

Then I'll put a bit of the juice around.

It has a nice color.

Oh, we'll remove this.

And maybe decorate it with a chive blossom or anything like that would be very nice.

(gentle music) This is a very elegant first course.

Tomato tartare.

The second dish, we want to work on mussel and pasta.

So I'm going to cook some large, those large rigatoni here.

I have boiling water here.

Salted water, I think.

Yep.

(pasta rattles) So stir it at the beginning so that the pieces don't stick together.

And after it's fine.

Have another pot of boiling water here.

And with this, we're going to cook peas.

And I have a pound of fresh peas here, which is about three pound of regular peas to do it.

And we want to do them with mint.

Bring them to a strong boil.

And they will take four, five minutes, depending on the size of your peas, to be tender.

So we have the pasta cooking, we have the pea cooking, now we'll cook something else.

I have about four pound of mussel here.

And you can see sometime, you look, those have been clean and that mussel is open.

I bang on it, nothing happened.

I touch the mussel inside here, nothing happened.

So this is really dead.

So even though I don't discard it all the time, because when I get them fresh, I think they're still good this way, but I would tell people, you know, not to keep them.

Now, let's see this one.

I bang it.

(mussel tapping) I can see... I can see the mussel is closing.

If the mussel is closing, it's because, you know, the mussel get aerated or whatever, open it, and then after it close.

So this one is good.

Okay.

The mussel that we get now are usually grown on wire, so they don't really have to worry about much sand in.

(mussel rattling) We have four pound of mussel.

And we're gonna cook that with white wine.

I have a nice Sauvignon blanc here, which is a fairly acidic wine that'd be good with it.

Put one tablespoon, maybe a bit more, enough to start it.

We only want to open our mussel here.

After they're all open, we're gonna go on with the sauce for the pasta.

Checking out my peas here, which are going all over the place.

So I'll take the cover off here and maybe check the peas.

Mm, pretty soon.

I tell you, I'm going to stay here because another 30 second, they're going to be ready.

This is very important in that recipe to do.

We're doing a puree with the pea.

To do the puree of pea as soon as they're out of the boiling water.

If they stay outside, the skin will shrivel on the outside, get tougher, and it will not emulsify in your food processor after.

So be sure that you drain it and you put it in there right away.

So I'm getting ready.

I'm going to have some cilantro in there.

I like the mixture of cilantro, mint.

Mint goes well with peas too.

But the mint, cilantro, and hot pepper, jalapeno pepper, goes well together.

Other mixture which we use in Oriental food.

You know, I cut that jalapeno in half and I do a... Taste that piece.

(knife tapping) It's not very hot, so I'm putting at least half, half of one jalapeno pepper.

So I can put all of that in there first.

And I think the peas are now cooked.

There is some big one and some thin ones, so I check the big one.

(metal taps) That's fine.

So we drain it.

(sieve clatters) And that goes directly in the food processor with sugar, a good bunch of sugar, dash of salt.

And here it goes.

(food processor whirring) And I'm gonna put some butter and a bit of olive oil in there.

And a dash of olive oil.

(food processor whirring) Mm, that's good.

This is a very delicate puree.

There you are.

You can do that ahead also and reheat it, you know, in the microwave oven.

It's fine.

Okay.

This is a beautiful puree of peas that we do there.

Now, let me check on this.

You can see that all my mussel are open now.

(mussels rattling) Great, it's full.

Let me check on the pasta.

That pasta takes a little while to cook, you know?

Yeah.

Takes another four or five minutes, so we are fine.

Now we're gonna drain this to be able to remove all of the juice and actually all of the... (mussels clattering) See when you're a chef in the kitchen, this is when you call the apprentice or the commis and say, can you take the mussel out of those?

So you put it on the side, and five minutes later you come back, it's done, you know?

This is the advantage of being the chef.

Now in this, we are going to do the vegetable for the mussel.

And I'm going to put some celery in there.

(knife tapping) Even with a bit of the leaves, it's perfectly fine here.

I have about enough here.

A cup.

Scallion.

(pan sizzling) Oh, scallion, I probably have enough with four large scallion like this.

(knife tapping) Usually in the cooking that I do, I do put a lot of vegetable.

I bet you that if I were to look in the 20 and some cookbook that I've done, the amount of fruit and vegetable that I have is probably three times as much as any other thing.

So garlic.

(hand thudding) (knife tapping) Coarsely done here.

Okay, a little bit of onion.

Maybe that much onion be fine.

(knife tapping) Always great to have a sharp knife, you know?

(knife tapping) You rarely cut yourself with a sharp knife.

(pan sizzling) And when you do, you have a nice clean cut that heal very fast, you know?

This is important.

Okay.

(pan sizzling) So here I have all those vegetables sauteing.

This, I'm going to have to clean them open because what we want to do here is actually just taking the center of the mussel.

Or remove it from both shell.

Sometime, you know, we used to, at least, if you were doing a fancy dish with mussel, we used to take the outside of the mussel here, which we call the the pan here, at the place where it's round there, which is the intestine, you would take that at the end and pull out.

And you have that long strip on the outside, which is more rubbery, you know?

So in the large mussel, we used to remove that, keeping only this.

But certainly it doesn't apply to small mussel and the type of dish, which is kind of coarse you know, that we are doing here.

Okay, put that on low.

Now, usually when I give a recipe, I give you the quantity of liquid which would come out of so much mussel.

And the reason is sometime you get a lot of juice out, sometime you don't get that much juice out, you know?

So whatever happen, look at the recipe and you adjust it for the quantity.

So here, I'll pour the juice out.

And you really don't have to filter it.

As I say, all you have to do to let it rest as it was and pour it gently.

And you will see that in the bottom of it, there is some.

Not very much here, but a little bit, you can see a little bit of sand here.

Yeah.

Debris right there.

Usually when I pick up my own mussel in Connecticut years ago, I would have a lot of that.

Here, not that much.

Anyway, so that goes in there with some saffron.

And the saffron I have here, the best saffron in the world, in my opinion, come from Spain, different part of Spain.

So there is some in Italy, actually, we grow some in the South of France, and in Iran.

This come from Iran.

So I'm being generous here, though they're expensive.

I'm putting that in there.

I love wonderful taste of saffron.

This is the pistil.

The pistil of a crocus flower.

I think there is four pistil per flower, and it takes 64,000 crocuses to do a pound of saffron, so saffron are very expensive, but wonderful.

Now, watch out because you have the false saffron, you have Mexican saffron, and you of those, which is quite different.

Less expensive but quite different.

So I'm putting that back in there.

(pan sizzling) And it will turn a wonderful brownish, reddish color, you know?

So all I have to do now is to continue shelling those, and then I'm going to add them to my stock here.

Okay, well, that's about it.

So I'm gonna put that back in the stock here.

You can see I have a beautiful yellowish color now.

This.

And my pasta.

Pasta is cooked, I can see that.

Yep.

So I'm gonna drain it.

That's it.

I'll shake it a little bit because I don't want to have too much water still left in it.

And this will go directly in there.

Let me see.

Check the pasta.

It's just cooked.

Still a bit al dente.

(metal clattering) The mussel and the pasta.

I could have a bit more juice here.

And it goes, you know, the reduction sometime is very strong.

I wouldn't want to put wine at that point here, because the wine would not cook enough.

But I put a little bit of Chateau Sink.

And the Chateau Sink, I have two at my house.

I have Chateau Sink on one side, Chateau Faucet from the other side.

We use a lot of water.

Okay, let me test.

And that's good.

A dash of salt.

Again, you know, usually I don't put much salt with mussel because they are salted.

But frankly, sometime there is not enough salt in it.

So you can serve that in large bowl.

I have a special bowl for mussel here that you can use.

And it's actually quite handy, you know, to use it this way.

What you do, you serve your mussel, especially, I mean, I'm serving mussel and pasta here, but if you do it without the pasta, you know, your mussel.

The idea is to incline this over, and you have all the juice coming here so you can dunk your baguette directly in there and eat it, you know?

And on top of that, I'm going to put some Parmesan cheese.

Now conventionally, you know, many Italian will tell you no Parmesan cheese with shellfish and pasta.

But I like it, first.

Secondly, my wife adore it.

Sometime we were in a big restaurant in New York, I remember an Italian restaurant, and we had shellfish, seafood and pasta.

And the maitre'd, Gloria called maitre'd and say, "Can I have some grated Parmesan cheese for the pasta?"

He said, "Oh."

So he disappeared and here comes the chef out.

And he say, "Who want Parmesan cheese on this pasta?"

And Gloria say, "Him!"

Talking to me.

I said, "Okay, it's okay."

They brought me the pasta.

This is the way it works.

(gentle music) (knife tapping) I am doing one of my favorite dessert with strawberry today, which is strawberry with strawberry coulis.

As you can see, I'm slicing the center of the berry here.

This is usually the sweetest spot of the berry.

When I get those berry like this, I take the hull out of it, you know, with the point of your knife.

You can remove the green, and usually that part here, it make goose pimple on your tongue when you eat that.

So this is a bit green.

I put that in the food processor.

Often the top is also a bit green, so I put it in there.

And the rest I slice to put into the man dish, if you want.

Because with that, we're going to do a sauce.

So this, you could do that with sugar, but I like that to do with jam.

And in that case here, I have a seedless raspberry jam.

And this is great with it.

The combination is terrific.

So we put that together.

(food processor whirring) You can actually do that ahead, you know, and it can marinate overnight.

It's fine.

As you see here, you wanna put that back right in there.

And that create your dessert.

So you have now strawberry with a strawberry coulis, you know?

And that's really nice.

Very often at home in summer that we have that, we serve that by itself.

Now taste it.

If you feel that the berry are too, still not sweet enough, then add a bit of sugar or more jam.

This one is perfectly fine.

So I'm gonna do cookie with it, although you can serve it, as I say, by itself.

Sometime I like to do crush cookie in it.

And here I have those beautiful butter cookie.

We can crush them.

(mallet tapping) And now we wanna build it up.

A beautiful cup here.

You wanna put some of that in there.

And some of the cookie, which is going to be absorbed, you know, right into the juice of the berry.

We are a bit more lavish today, so we go on with a bit of sour cream or, you know, you could put creme fraiche or whipped cream.

You know, one of those would be fine too.

Then, of course, more berry.

There we go.

More cookie if you want on top.

And maybe even a little more creme fraiche in the middle of it, you know?

Or sour cream, creme fraiche, whipped cream.

Any of this.

Like a sprig of mint in the center of it.

This is a beautiful dessert that you're going to enjoy in summer, in spring, whenever the strawberry are the great time of the strawberry.

And with our menu today, we had a beautiful pasta.

The pasta with the saffron, remember, and the mussel.

And of course that tomato tartare, one of the great ones to enjoy with this, is a Sauvignon blanc.

And that's what we are having today.

I hope you enjoyed the show today.

Happy cooking.