- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

It's wonderful to take classic recipe and fit them into a modern lifestyle.

This can be a challenge, but the rewards are great and healthy too.

Today's menu take a new approach to old classic, beginning with Christmas oyster, particularly good at this time of the year, served on a bed of spinach, red pepper sauce.

My version of chicken supreme Kiev-style is much leaner than the traditional recipe.

I serve it with bulgur wheat pilaf.

For dessert, prune and grapefruit in a sauce of red wine, incorporating the old with the new.

Classic recipe done in a new and healthy manner on "Today's Gourmet."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Today we're going to do a menu which reinterpret old recipe in a modern style.

And what we're going to do with, I just put a little bit of oil in the skillet.

We're going to start with making a recipe with oyster, a very light type of recipe, great for the holiday.

We will have a bit of olive oil there.

I'm going to crush some garlic to put in it and we're going to cook spinach into it.

That's going to be a bed, a bed of spinach under the oyster.

So I chop my garlic very fine here.

We crush it first so that we develop more taste, and that goes directly into our oil here and the spinach.

Now, you can see the spinach, sometimes you get it, there is a long stem attached to it.

Conventionally, we take the top.

Really, if they are very fibrous, you may even take that part out of it.

But those are tender so you just cut the top like that, and keep the stem and all that to put in a soup, or to do spinach in puree, you know.

So you don't wanna burn your garlic, you wanna place that in there, and you don't need to do anything to your spinach.

You know, there is enough moisture in it to cook.

I have a whole bunch of spinach here, close to a pound.

And what you do after I put them in there, I kind of turn them so that the garlic is on top and doesn't burn underneath here.

And the moisture will come out of it.

Then I have a bunch of oyster in their own juice here, and I will stop that to cook, this has to come barely to a little boil.

So my pot was very hot.

What I'm going to do now is to reduce it to low and basically let it sit in that liquid.

I may even take it off now.

And now with this, because that barely has to cook, as I say, to a boil, what we want to do is a puree of red pepper.

And the puree of red pepper, I have some cooking right here.

So those red pepper, I cut them into pieces, a little bit of water, I cook them until basically the water disappears.

There is no salt, there is nothing in it, and that cooks about 10 minutes.

What we want to do is to put them into a food mill.

You really don't wanna put them into a food processor because you want to take the, you know the fiber of the skin and make a puree out of that.

Beautiful bright red puree.

So we're going to have that beautiful bright red puree with the spinach.

So it's really Christmassy-like.

Red and green.

So that's what we have here.

The fiber remain in there, as you can see.

So it's a nice way of doing a puree of pepper.

And that goes back directly in there with, remember, there is no seasoning.

Now, I'm putting a little tablespoon, maybe not even half a tablespoon of butter, a dash of salt.

And we just wanna bring that to a boil just to melt this, and the sauce is basically finished.

(pans sizzling) I wanna look at my spinach here.

They are cooking.

You can also cover them, you know?

Okay, now I want to put a dash of salt on top of this too.

Of course you don't wanna put any salt in there because you already have all of the seasoning.

Now, you see those oyster here, I should have a slotted spoon is better, are barely cooked.

The pan around the oyster, what we call the pan frills.

And that's enough.

So those oysters are very, very lightly cooked.

So what I want to do is to remove them because I wanna use the juice to make a sauce with it.

So I have about, those are small oyster, and I will show you how to open them.

So the juice that I have here, I just want to season it with a little bit of olive oil, about a tablespoon and a half, and we put like half a tablespoon of butter in there also.

We bring all of that to a strong boil, and that creates our sauce.

My spinach are basically ready now I see the moisture coming out of it.

(utensil banging) So we have here the oyster and the oyster.

You open them at the corner here, you cut right through, and that's it.

This is the way the oyster are served on the half shell.

What you do, you cut them here so that they are easier to slurp.

Then we put them in this.

When all my oyster are open, I wash them in the liquid, transfer them to a bowl, and pour the liquid on top of it, keeping the bottom part of it right there.

So what we want to do now is to present those oyster, and what we have here is this.

There is different way of presenting it.

I can present it directly on the plate right here or in the shell right there.

Let me get first my red sauce.

The red sauce would go in the bottom.

You put them right here, you know, so you have that beautiful, absolutely stunning red here.

We put the oyster on top of it, which is like a cushion of oyster, I mean, the spinach rack, a cushion right on top of it here.

Then remember, we have our oyster in the middle, about six oyster per person, barely cooked here.

And on top of it we can arrange the sauce which is made from the juice of the oyster around.

And on top of this, we are putting hijiki here, which is a dry seaweed that I have here.

And that dry seaweed, you just put it in water and it reconstitute to that.

It's a dry seaweed which is edible that the Japanese eat, and it is extremely beautiful and decorative.

Of course, we can also arrange that directly in your plate here with the spinach underneath.

I can do one for you to show you, putting the spinach, putting this in there, the spinach inside each of the oyster there, and the juice on top.

You can do the whole plate this way.

But what I want to do now is to show you different type of oyster.

We used to have only a couple of oyster in the market.

Now there is 15, 20 different type of oyster in the market.

We have here some Fanny Bay oyster, we have some Hama Hama oyster, we have some Rock Point oyster.

This is Malpeque from Northern Canada.

Very cold.

The Tamales oyster here, the tiny, tiny one, and the Kumamoto oyster from a Japanese stock.

All of this we can get mostly year round, and that's usually served either with a conventional ketchup, horseradish sauce, or the mignonette in France, which is the vinegar, and shallots, and herb in it.

And this is delicious served on the half shell this way.

And now for our main course, we're going to do a very classic dish, a chicken Kiev, but totally different than what we used to do.

Much lower calorie.

And to start with, I have a little bit of oil here, we're gonna put some onion to do a puree, (knife tapping) of a puree of mushroom to stuff the chicken.

You know, conventionally it used to be stuffed with butter, but we're going to do it quite differently.

So here I have about a cup of chopped onion.

You know, we're going to do this to put it to cook right there.

And with this, you wanna saute the onion for a minute or so.

And with that, what we wanna do is garlic and mushroom.

And three cloves of garlic like that should be more than enough.

I'm going to put that directly in the food processor, the garlic first.

(food processor whirring) And after, the mushroom.

You know, we wanna do what we call a duxelles of mushroom.

In France that is like a sharp mushroom, like a type of puree.

Not really a puree of mushroom, because it's a bit coarser.

And what you wanna do here is to pulse it nicely.

You see, you don't want to leave it on, otherwise you'll make a mess that is a lower layer end up into a mush, and the top pieces float in the air.

So you want to start, stop, start, stop (food processor whirring) until you're happy with it, as I am right here.

Okay.

And now remember, I have the garlic in there, the garlic as well as the mushroom.

(pan sizzling) So here my onions are sauteing nicely.

So I want to put that in there.

And this has to cook for a few minutes so the the liquid comes out of the mushroom, you know?

There is always a certain amount of liquid in the mushrooms which starts coming out as it cooks.

(pan sizzling continues) And that you can hear now that the mushrooms are sizzling.

But within a few minutes you won't hear it, within a minute or so because the liquid from the mushroom comes out.

(utensil tapping) Okay, and finally we're going to put some cilantro in there, which I don't need for the time being.

What I want to do next, this is for the stuffing, remember, of the chicken.

What we want to do is the coating for the chicken now, and the coating of the chicken is going to do fresh breadcrumbs.

One slice of bread now, if I put it into the food processor like that, give me close to half a cup of fresh breadcrumbs.

Now we have to take that slice of bread and make croutons, put it in the oven to have dry bread.

Put it in the food processor, I would get about two to three tablespoon of breadcrumbs instead of half a cup.

So fresh breadcrumbs versus dry breadcrumbs is like day and night, so don't confuse it.

So here I have some cilantro, what we call cilantro, or Japanese parsley or Chinese parsley, or coriandre, or coriander in English.

And which you use a great deal now.

So we're gonna put that in there.

(food processor clicking) Okay.

(food processor whirring) And again here doing a breadcrumb with that, a flavored breadcrumb, you know?

And you see, in seconds, you have beautiful breadcrumbs.

So what I'll do here is to move this out of the way.

First, place my breadcrumbs in there, and you see, if I were to use that breadcrumbs flavored only the way it is now, it would have a tendency to fall off the chicken.

So we have to get it moist a little bit and crusty.

So you put a little bit of oil now in it, like barely a tablespoon.

And what you want to do is to rub it gently with your fingers.

You see, you don't wanna mess it up into a gooey mixture.

You still want it to be very fluffy but slightly wet with the oil, it make all the difference in the world, you know?

To do this right there.

Okay.

So now I have my coating ready.

Let's see, you can see that you don't hear anything now, there is a lot of the water boiling around, and that water is the water of the mushroom.

I think I put a little bit of salt already, yes.

So I can put my coriander, the herb, we put a lot of coriander, because the chicken Kiev, Russian type of chicken Kiev is flavored with the flavoring used in Russia.

And here we have coriander, although very conventionally it is done with dill, you know?

Now, I'll cook that one more second, then I'll move on here to do the garnish with this.

And what we are going to do with that is bulgur, and I have here bulgur uncooked.

And the bulgur is actually cracked wheat, you know, and that cracked wheat is steamed and dry out.

So it is pre-cooked, all you have to do is to dump it.

And this is half a cup, that's what I get with half a cup.

When it's soaked in water for a couple of hours, if you put it in boiling water, it takes less time, and then you drain it out.

That's it, three to one.

So what we want, you don't really have to cook it longer, although you can.

I have a cup of red onion here, we're going to saute those red onions.

(pan sizzling) Put a little bit of garlic in it.

I wanna saute that for a second before I mix my bulgur in it.

It's sizzling now.

And during that time I think that I remove my stuffing for the chicken.

See, I wanna spread this out because theoretically I would want to cool that off, so, you know, I don't burn my finger, and I put it in the chicken when cold, you know?

(utensil banging) So this can come here, we're going to use it for the chicken.

(pan sizzling) And going back to the bulgur here, I sauteed the red onion.

Those red onion are cut in dice about quarter of an inch, you know?

Which is nice.

I put my bulgur here which is still wet, remember, a dash of salt, cracked pepper, dash of pepper.

And what I have with this that I'm going to put at the end is peas here.

But the peas, I will only put it at the end so that they keep their green color and are nice.

So what I would want to do is to cook that bulgur for four, five minutes really.

Remember, as I say that is precooked, just basically to absorb the remaining moisture in it so it's not too wet.

And during that time I wanna show you how to do our chicken Kiev here.

So what we have here is two breasts of chicken that I have here.

One with skin, the other one without skin.

We used to do that with the skin, we used also to stuff the chicken with butter and actually, you know.

Look at that.

I have one stick of butter here, four ounces.

We used to put practically a whole stick of butter inside the chicken.

It's quite different nowadays.

In addition, I remove the skin here, just pull the skin out, you know?

Cut it off.

But I keep the first wing here just for make it a bit nicer.

So here is the little filet that we have here on those breasts of chicken.

Maybe you can buy those breasts of chicken this way.

So you take a knife, you wanna go flat and open that breast of chicken in half, you know?

This way, that's what we call butterfly.

That is this way, the same thing with that one here.

You need a thin knife and sharp, you know?

Here we are.

And you could use a piece of plastic wrap as I do here to flatten it, (mallet banging) or basically nothing will be fine also, you know?

Providing you kind of slide it on top of it.

This is the filet, remember?

So I'm doing those two breasts of chicken here.

(mallet banging) Okay.

What I want to do is a little bit of salt and pepper on top, just a dash really.

And now we want to put the stuffing, and as I said before, you know, you'll be a bit better if your stuffing was a bit cooler than mine.

But here it is, you arrange your stuffing on top of it.

You know, remember that I have a stuffing for about four breast here.

That part, the filet, I'll put it back on here and bring back that part here.

I mean you want to encase it entirely, you know?

Like that.

So it looks nice and stuffy.

Have another one here.

Again, the same idea, the breast here, bring that on top, roll it.

And now we want to bread it.

Remember that it used to be done in eggs and so forth.

I have evaporated milk here.

We dip it in the evaporated milk, and finally, in the breadcrumbs here.

Now, what was done with it before also, it was deep fried.

Now we are not deep frying it, and it's because I put a little bit of oil in there.

It's going to brown in the oven.

I have it here, again, the same way here.

So as you see, this is a really, really much lower calorie version of the original, and it's really nice and moist.

You don't want to overcook it in the oven, about 25 minutes, you know, 20, 25 minutes at 400 degree.

And we wanna put that in the oven now.

I have one here which has been cooking for that amount of time.

Here it is, nice and brown.

What I wanna do is to arrange it on that plate here.

The first thing that I wanna do however, is to finish the bulgur.

Remember that I still have to put the peas in it, and those are baby peas, frozen baby peas.

Of course, if you put fresh peas, I use both, because I like the frozen baby peas, providing it is written the tiny baby peas, you know?

They are much more tender than the other.

We'll bring that back to the center.

I think, you know, you can arrange that directly in there, you know?

I think I'll put only a couple here.

Here we are.

That makes a nice bed, you know, you put it in the center and spread it out.

And remember that those are much lower calorie.

They are done instead of with cream, sometimes we used to use cream, sometimes we even used to use eggs and a mixture of cream.

And this is done with skimmed milk.

I may have said evaporated milk before, but it's skimmed milk before that we put in there.

And basically you can decorate that with a little bit of cilantro extra if you want.

Because this is what we have in the garnish right here.

And this is our delicious breast of chicken as our main course today.

(upbeat music) With that holiday meal, you know, we want to do a very light dessert, you know, with fruit, and what I have here, it's prunes, peeled already, a bit of brown sugar, and some seasoning.

So I will put the prunes directly to cook into a little saucepan.

And what I have here is vanilla beans, and that's going to go in it too.

And when you finish using it, you can dry it out and put it back in your sugar or keep it until next time, it will flavor it.

I have clove and peppercorn here, because we want that mixture to be a bit spicy, you know, so you want to cook that in there, make a little package of seasoning in there also.

Your brown sugar, and about a cup, three quarter of a cup of wine I think I put in it, a deep red wine.

We have a Cabernet Sauvignon here from Napa Valley.

So we will put that to cook, it cooks about 10 minute, you know?

And then you want to reduce the juice a little bit if needed.

And this is what we have here.

And to serve that, you want to eliminate of course, the little package, your vanilla beans.

And we wanna serve that with grapefruit.

And I cut that grapefruit already here almost totally, you know, using a knife like this, as you see, you kind of use it in a jigsaw fashion to cut all around this way so that your grapefruit is totally clean, totally nude, yeah?

And then we can cut in between the segment, like this, at least for the first segment.

The second one, you cut, twist your knife around, and cut again, and so forth.

You do that all around to have those beautiful segments that I have here.

Some of that juice is going to go right into the prune.

And now we want to arrange that on a plate, you know?

You can put a little bit of the juice first if you want, you know, in the bottom.

It's going to be nice and rich.

And, you know, the richness of the prunes here is going to be just counteract by this, which is a little bit bitter, you know, your grapefruit.

So that's going to be very nice.

Arrange as many segments as you want, you know, in between.

To us, you see, this is a very simple type of dessert but quite flavorful and which would go well with the dinner that we have tonight.

You can decorate that with a couple of eating flowers.

This is lavender.

And we have that beautiful dessert that we're going to serve with our chicken Kiev.

And we have a real festive, very colorful menu, our holiday menu today.

And festive doesn't necessarily have to be high in calories, I mean, we have reinterpreted those classic dish in a very, very light way.

The oysters are very colorful with that deep red sauce and the deep green of the spinach underneath.

A little bit of the hijiki may make it a bit esoteric and special.

Of course, the the chicken Kiev for me is great interpretation.

And remember the stuffing, which used to be in olden times stuffed with butter.

I mean, look at the stuffing inside, I mean, we have that puree of mushroom, which is absolutely beautiful there with the bulgur around.

We already have a salad and our light dessert here of fruit, which goes so well with our menu.

And with festive occasion, what do we drink?

Champagne.

There is nothing like champagne for festive occasion.

And I have three great champagnes here of France.

And champagne, of course, is a sparkling one from the north center part of France.

And usually, the great champagnes are always what we call brut, you know?

And brut is the really very, very dry one.

So the first thing that you do when you open champagne, you want to take that cage on top here, undo it around.

Always kind of keep your thumb on top of it, you know, to hold it.

And what I do here, you wanna hold it and move actually the bottle, not the cork, the bottle that it move here, and very gently up to have it, and then pour it.

There is nothing, just the sound of champagne make me think of holiday, make me think of the family.

And of course, it's expensive, but it is worth it.

There is nothing for the celebration like a cold glass of champagne with our festive meal.

I hope you're going to do that menu for your friend or for your family, with French, or we have great American champagne here too, and I'm sure they're going to enjoy it.

I loved to do it for you.

Happy cooking.

(mellow music)