- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

A good cook uses everything in the kitchen, creating exciting dishes with leftover food.

Everyone can learn to economize, both in preparation and in cleanup.

Today's menu reflect these ideas.

Our pea pod soup with a (indistinct) recipe made from throwaway pods, Tender and juicy steak maitre d'hotel, come from a thrifty cut served with a succulent stew of peas and ham.

And for the desert, potted plum with a crunchy cap of filo leaf.

Economy will increase your knowledge and enjoyment in the kitchen.

It saves both time and money and you'll savor the result.

So join me on "Today's Gourmet."

(soothing jazz music) (soothing jazz music continues) I like to use everything in the kitchen.

For me, the indication of a good chef, Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish, male, female doesn't make any difference, is the use often of leftover or using everything in the kitchen.

And today, that's what we are going to do.

Here, I have peas.

And as you see, those peas, we're going to use them in one of our dish and I just washed them before.

And what we do is to remove the pea, the fresh pea from the pod.

And the pod, here, I'm going to use that in a soup to use the thriftiness in the kitchen.

I have about 12 ounce of peas.

And that, we're going to use that later.

In the recipe, also, we are using a leek.

And as you can see, I clean that leek here.

The end of the green, the end of the green here, here and there.

But basically, I don't remove much.

You know, it is not a good idea to cut everything off and discard this.

And even the few pieces that I discard, which are too tough, I keep that for stock.

So we do use everything.

So what we want to do first is to cut (leek crunches) that leek.

And it really doesn't matter how coarsely you want to cut it here because we are going to strain it anyway.

We're going to put that in a food mill.

So I put that into that pot with a tablespoon of of butter, of oil rather.

And I use here, a canola type of oil, which is a polyunsaturated type of oil.

And I have onion also.

I have an onion.

(food sizzling) And I like, you know, when I do a soup, to stew the vegetable a little bit before I put the liquid in it.

Then a potato.

The potato is going to be the binding agent here.

And you can again, cut them any way you want.

See I can peel the potato ahead, providing I keep them in water.

But when I take them out of the water, I don't like to rewash them because it takes too much of the starch out of it.

What I want to do is to saute that first a little bit.

And put our potato.

And again, another fallacy about soup, you know, is that you have to use stock.

I use water.

And I like, especially with vegetable, to use water because I really have the taste of the the vegetable closer to the way it should be.

So water is perfectly fine.

And soup doesn't have to take hours to cook either.

You know, it cook pretty fast.

Put a dash of salt in this.

And I put my pea pod which is going to cook.

Of course, you have to realize that this is going to melt kind of done, you know.

You have to realize that if you use your pea pod, then, I have one cooked here, you cannot put your soup in a food processor.

If you put the soup in a food processor, you're going to have all of those fiber in the pea pod that you cannot really use.

So what you have to do is to put it through a food mill.

And I have started here, that type of food mill, you know with little hole and different blade, you can push things through and the fiber will remain there.

So that's what I have here, you know.

This is really home cooking.

And if I had to choose one dish out of all the dish that I eat all the time, if I was on an island and having to choose one dish, I would pick up a soup and probably a soup with potato and leek.

That's what I like the best.

So this here, we strain this.

There is, you can go back and forth with this, you know.

And basically, you see what will remain is the fiber here, those little pieces from the pod, you know.

Gotta bring that underneath.

And our soup here could be served as such.

If you want to have it slightly richer, I put it back in there, you know, with maybe a tablespoon of butter if you want to splurge a little bit.

(pot taps) Right there.

You can do that at the last moment.

You know, if we use butter, we use, of course, only unsalted butter.

And in our show, very little.

You know, those soup used to be finished with a lot of heavy cream and the butter.

We'll put maybe a little piece, but at the end, when you get maximum taste out of it.

I have a nice thick soup here.

And of course, I would serve that maybe with some crouton, a bit of chive on top.

This is a very satisfying type of first course for me.

Soup is always welcome in any type of dish.

And here, what we are going to do is to put a little bit of chives on top.

And you know, frankly the crouton could be also put on top or around.

If you put the cru on top, do it at the last moment because you don't want them to get soggy.

You want them to be like this.

And this is our first course for a very thrifty dinner.

We use the beans in the summer, but summer for me is also beans and peas, you know.

All of it in my garden usually.

And here, I have a whole array of different dry and fresh peas.

I have those dry pinto beans here and when they are really fresh, they cook very fast, in like 30 minutes.

Here I have the string bean, you know.

And those string beans, when I was a kid, we really used to string them.

There is no string anymore.

So you can take only the end part of it and sometime even that part, which is a bit tougher.

The snow peas here have to be string on one side, at least this side and take the end off here.

Sometime there is a string also.

Those are snap peas.

And snap peas, you know of those peas inside, but you eat the whole thing.

But you have to string it.

On this side and again, around on the other side.

And this is terrific, you know.

And finally, here, we have those large one which are fava beans.

And those fava beans, how you see, are quite large.

Very cotton inside.

You really cannot use the shell.

But this is good.

Now, a lot of people cook it this way.

It's even better if you take the shell out of it.

It's difficult to take.

So what you do, you drop that in boiling water, boil it once second, and I have them here.

And after that, you just make a little hole here and press it out.

You see it'll pop out.

So you make a little hole and press it out like this.

You do the same thing with lima bean.

And those now are really tender and nice.

Just blanched this way.

And finally, here, we have our regular peas, which we are going to use today.

You know, those peas.

Remember that we use those pod here for our soup.

And now, we're going to use this with our stew that we have here.

And the first thing we're going to do there is to saute a little bit of onion and some scallion here.

We start our stew this way.

You know, a stew of peas.

Really type of home cooking, which I love, because it's flavored with a little bit of ham, but not much of it.

So what we do, a bit of onion.

Again, that we want to chop fairly coarsely, you know, again, across.

(knife thudding) All that come from the garden, you know.

It's always nice to go to the garden and cook.

But I tell you, it is good, one of the only vegetables that I use frozen is the peas.

The tiny baby peas, you know.

And frozen, they are good.

I'll tell you why.

Unless you have a garden and have them very fresh, the sugar in them tend to turn into starch pretty fast.

You know, so the frozen pea are acceptable and quite good for me.

Remember that the peas are very, very high in protein.

The legume, they are leguminous and actually so high in protein, about three times as much as regular as most vegetable, you know, so this is nice.

What we are going to do here in the old style or old style of cooking, if you want, or home style of cooking, to saute, you see, the onion with a bit of scallion.

I put a little piece of butter in this one.

And with that, we're going to do what we call a roux.

That is a mixture.

Boy, those onions are strong.

(pot tapping) A little bit of flour.

And I have about one and a half, two teaspoon of flour.

You spread it on top of the mixture.

This is a technique we call singer in French, that is to singe, to spread out your flour here.

And again, remember when we use a starch, we dilute the starch with liquid, otherwise, the protein set and it form lump.

Likewise, here, when you do a roux, actually, the butter does the same thing.

It spread out the segment of the flour and prevent it from lumping on you.

Then you can cook it for a minute or so.

Then we put liquid in that time.

We just put water here, you know.

And that amount of flour, I have about a teaspoon and a half here, will just give me something slightly nice and syrupy.

I'm going to stir it until it's all melted.

And basically, that's what you want to do.

Now, I put my carrot to do the stew and we want to bring the, oh and a little bit of the herbes de Provence.

I prepared herbes de Provence, that mixture of different herb with oregano, I even have lavender flowers in there.

I wanna bring that to a boil and cook that for a few minutes.

Then we'll add the peas.

And finally, at the end, a little bit of that ham, which is used as a flavoring agent, which if you don't want to use, you can omit.

With that type of a simple stew of vegetable, you know, which is often what we had as a main course when I was a kid, we're going to have a steak, but very inexpensive steak.

What we call in France the steak du boucher.

Butcher steak, you know.

And those are unknown or not very well known cut and very good and as I say, inexpensive and those very lean.

This is the shoulder blade steak.

You will recognize it because inside, you have that long, narrow strip, very gelatinous.

We call in New York and on the West Coast also, I think this is called chicken steak, you know.

Small steak like that or three four ounces is terrific.

We have a steak probably unknown here, which is in the cavity of the pelvis bone.

We call that the oyster steak.

Like the oyster in the chicken, you know, there in the cavity.

Usually that, the butcher eat it.

Then we have that long, narrow thing that now people do fajita with.

And this is the skirt steak.

It's inside the cavity of the animal.

It's actually the breathing apparatus, you know.

The plexus solarium there.

So you have a large muscle on each side.

Skirt steak, this is what they use now for fajita or those type of Mexican dish, which are very good.

This is a great steak we call l'onglet in France.

And again in the center of the animal in between the rib, there is a hanging piece of meat like this.

This is what is called the hanging tenderloin.

In France, l'onglet is considered one of the best steak.

Again, there is that large muscle in the center.

Notice that most of those steak, not the skirt teak, but the other one are going to be very, very lean and juicy, you know.

Finally, what we use today is that piece of meat, which is from the hip.

And that piece of meat from the hip, as you see, it's a bit the shape of a triangle and we call it the triangle steak.

Again, very, very lean and I can cut it thin, you know, like this, to cut a steak of approximately five ounces, if I do it thin.

It's barely five ounces this way.

A very lean piece of meat.

And I'm going to cook two steak.

What you would want to do, you know, is just simply put a bit of salt and pepper on top of this on each side.

Now, you don't put salt on top of a piece of meat until you are ready to use it because the salt will tend to draw out the moisture, you know, and that's often what people say.

Do you salt meat before?

Yes, it is true that the salt will draw out the moisture.

The point is however, that it's going to take like a couple of hours before it draws out the moisture.

So there is nothing wrong in putting a little bit of salt just before you cook it.

If you prefer not to put the salt on top, it's fine also.

It has a different taste.

But the salt at the end of cooking doesn't go into it the same way.

I think that we can put that to cook now in our grill.

You know, this way, very thin steak.

And I think we should be close to ready to put our peas, you know.

Remember that we have here, all we have here what our carrot and the peas.

So we have a lot of beautiful color.

And again the fresh peas will take about seven, eight minutes to cook.

Finally, we are going to put the ham in it.

But for the time being, before doing this, I want show you how to make what we call a maitre de butter, a beurre maitre d'hotel we call in France.

And this is the seasoning butter.

In modern cooking, you know a lot what we do to replace what we used to do olden days, (indistinct) sauce and so forth.

I have one finish here, you can freeze it, put it in a piece of plastic wrap.

When you're ready to use it, you know we cut it into pieces like this.

Of course, take the paper from around it.

And we keep that in ice.

You know, very often in restaurant, and you will put a little piece, like half tablespoon of butter on top of a steak and you'll have all the flavor that you need.

And you know, a tablespoon of butter with the seasoning in it, is about 100 calories.

So it's not that much.

Let me see, my steak now has to be turned this way.

As you can see, it'll be marked nicely.

Depending how rare you want it, it's going to be cooked soon.

What I have here is two tablespoon of butter that I'm going to put in there, and lemon juice, like a tablespoon of lemon juice, we want to put on top of it here.

You know, again, you know, unsalted, sweet butter.

That's what we do the beurre maitre d'hotel.

You can do a tarragon butter, then you will have tarragon, of course.

But here the beurre maitre d'hotel would be lemon juice and parsley, you know.

And this is the curly parsley, you know, which I'm going to cut just coarsely here to put in there with the lemon juice.

This is an ideal little machine to ground herb very finely.

That goes on top.

And finally, that piece should make it firm here.

(grinder whirring) Okay.

The butter has to be fairly soft to work well.

And we can put a little more, let me taste, maybe a little more lemon juice in there will do well.

Here we are.

You know, it depends.

Sometime during the summer, I go through the garden and do a an herb butter.

Take six, seven different type of of herbs, you know.

(grinder whirring) And basically, that mixture here, you can now use it as is, or you can put it as I did here, roll it and keep it in your refrigerator.

But it is a great flavor.

So what we'll do here, maybe I leave it directly in there because I may use the cold one, which is going to work better on the steak.

But now, let's see.

Our steak should be close to ready.

There.

I can mark it on both sides.

But when you do small steak like this, one side is enough.

They cook a couple of minutes on each side if you want it relatively rare, you know.

And again, it's a question of taste, you know.

Now my peas here.

See, this is a beautiful stew of peas.

Very often, when I was a kid, my mother would do that as a dish by itself.

That is, as the main course of the meal, you know.

And what she would do, I'm putting ham in there, you know, but she would use leftover meat.

Like if you do a roast of veal, chicken, whatever.

Then she would start it with little pieces of the leftover meat to use as a flavoring agent.

Again, a thrifty way of cooking.

And we're going to present that on this, you know.

You will want to put, again, don't worry, when you do that type of presentation, you put all thing in the middle, then out, then spread out with your fork to make a kind of nest.

And on top of this, I have my steak here, small steak right in the center of it, and my little piece of beurre maitre d'hotel.

And this is our man course for today.

(mellow piano music) And let's make our dessert now.

Some people think it the best part of the meal, you know.

When in nut, when in doubt, start with dessert, people say.

So what we have here is plum, beautiful Santa Rosa plum.

What you want is any type of plum, but other fruit will work quite well also.

What's important with fruit is really that it's ripe.

That will determine the amount of sugar that you put in it.

And all of this makes a big difference between if you have a pear, which is really hard and unripe and something which is really ripe.

So here, we cut them, we quarter those Santa Rosa.

You can use all the type of plum.

One way or the other, we take the pit out of it and we do a type of stew with it.

I put a little, like about one teaspoon and a half of butter, not too much, you know, here.

And with that, we are going to put the plum to saute them.

They're going to get soft, you know.

Of course, they're going to get soft (plums sizzling) and run off some liquid.

Then we put beautiful nuts here, those pistachio nuts, even the color there is really striking.

A dash of water, you know, to stop the moisture.

(plums sizzling) And our sweetening agent, you know.

I'm putting some apricot jam in there.

Okay, we make that together.

And you know, we're going to do other thing to it.

But frankly, you could do this and serve that in a nice glass bowl with a little bit of cream, a little bit of yogurt, or by itself, or with a cookie.

Be a great dessert by itself.

So what we have here, that should cook, and I have one here, which is already cooked after five, six minutes of cooking.

And this is what we are going to do now.

With it, we're going to put that in the little ramekin here, you know, to fill it up.

Those are nice and you could even do a type of custard with that.

That is, putting it this way and with a little bit of custard on top or cream, fill them up, you know.

This is about half a cup ramekin, you know.

So maybe I'll fill up those three here to show you.

And what we want to do on top is filo dough.

And the filo dough is that type of dough made with water and flour.

Those thin, very thin.

And as you can see I had a wet towel on top because if you don't have that wet towel top, it's going to dry out.

But what we do, we want to do a hat with that.

Brush that very lightly with butter, you know.

We use about one good tablespoon, one and a half tablespoon of butter for four sheet.

Sprinkle with a little bit of sugar on top.

And then, with that, we want to put the butter and the sugar on the outside and form a kind of hat, you know, very loose on top of it, that we put like a handkerchief, you know, like this.

As you can see, it's quite easy and it make a striking thing.

And you know, those sheet of filo used to be difficult to get.

Now you can get that very easily basically in all market.

You know, you do all kind of hors d'oeuvres with it.

The classic way is stuffed with spinach in the Greek manner too.

But look at that here.

You can do it that open or then the other way.

This way doesn't matter.

What you don't want to do, you don't want to squeeze it very tight into a bowl where the dough is going to get together.

You want to have some space in between, so that it can brown nicely in the oven, you know.

And I have it here.

Okay, gathering it gently.

And that's it.

And this now, you want to put in the oven around 350, 375 degree oven.

It's going to cook.

You want to serve that kind of lukewarm, you know.

I have some which are ready here.

And the dough, as you can see, is going to get very crisp and hard.

And this makes, of course, a very nice presentation.

You know, very striking.

A bit unusual.

Those are still warm, but as I say, you would wanna serve that basically lukewarm.

And that very, you see, you can hear it, very crunchy and all that, and that's how you want it.

Eat that with a little spoon.

You can serve that just by itself here.

A bit hot.

You can even put, if you want, a tiny bit of powdered sugar on top to give it more flair even, you know.

Sometimes, in modern cuisine, they even decorate the plate with powdered sugar or cocoa to give a different effect.

And this is our beautiful dessert for our menu.

Some of the greatest meal I ever had in my life were done with very inexpensive ingredient.

So sometimes, people think that they do have to spend a great deal of money to make a good meal.

And sometimes it's good to have caviar, without any question.

But very often, at home, you can recognize a good cook in what he does in the kitchen by using everything.

This is what I call good cooking.

And I'm very impressed when I go to a kitchen and see someone who can use a chicken, and use the bone, and use the neck, and use the the skin, and use the meat, and so forth.

I know that person has knowledge of cooking.

That's a bit what we did in our menu today, especially with our pea pod soup.

We use leek and of course, onion and the potato.

But the pea pod is a nice addition to it.

It has a nice, fun taste.

That soup is served hot as we have it with some crouton, a bit of herb.

If you want to splurge, you could even finish it with cream or you could put some milk in it, if you want, and serve it cold with some chive, just like a vichyssoise.

You know, one of those cold soup that you have in summer.

It's quite good.

Then we have our little steak.

Remember, this is not a sirloin or a filet mignon.

It is from the hip part of the animal.

It's a very lean steak.

It's a small one.

It's about four, five ounces, with that beautiful stew of peas, which could be served other main course by itself and that would be very nice.

We also have a salad.

And finally, the beautiful de dessert with the filo cap.

You know the filo is made of water and flour, and except for a little bit of butter that I put in it, those sheet of filo are less than one ounce.

So it's not that much and it truly dress it up.

You could do it, of course, with raspberry or other type of fruit.

And if you don't wanna put the cap on top, you can serve it just plain as a stew as we have it here.

And that will be terrific too.

And with that stew, I would serve a good glass of wine.

Today, we have a pinot noir.

A pinot noir from the Sonoma County.

A very rich complex and very delicious and fruity wine.

And I will enjoy it with my meal.

I hope you do that meal for your friend and save a bit of money in the kitchen.

You will enjoy eating the meat as much as I will eating that meal now.

I enjoyed cooking it for you.

Happy cooking.