- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

When you can cook with fresh vegetables, you have it all, flavor and color without fat, cholesterol, and extra calories.

Just add a touch of imagination and even the most humble of vegetables can become elegant and refined.

We'll start our menu with wontons stuffed with mushroom, shallots, and leeks served in a robust red wine sauce.

Our main course vegetable dish is a galette, a baked pancake, sandwich layer of potato and spinach.

And for our showstopper dessert, frozen yogurt served in a caramel cup with crystallized mint leaf and rose petal.

All this with a special appearance by my favorite sous chef with vegetable elegance coming up on "Today's Gourmet" (upbeat music begins) (upbeat music continues) Today we're going to do an interesting menu, vegetable elegance.

The whole menu is only six grams of saturated fat and only 20 milligram of cholesterol.

Remember that the daily limit is about 300 milligram.

We are doing only with vegetable, but a very satisfying meal.

Altogether, we're going to do a red wine sauce, but the first thing that I want to show you is a potato galette, and I'm gonna put my heat on and slice those potato.

Those are Yukon.

If they are too big, slice a little bit so that it fit into your food processor.

This is the thinnest blade that we are using here.

And, ope, this way.

(machine whirs) In a great machine this way you can use the trimming also, it doesn't matter.

(machine whirs) That's it.

That's basically all of my potato, except for that little piece, and this has cut very thin.

I washed the potato before, but you wanna wash them again after, as you can see here, to remove some of the starch out of it.

But if you don't remove the starch, they will stick a bit together too much.

But otherwise you could leave them together.

So what we want to do first is to drain them out.

In that case here, I'm going to just drain them in my hand and put them directly in the skillet with a little bit of olive oil.

What happen is that, if you do what I'm doing here, the only difference is that it may splatter a little bit when you put it on the oil, but otherwise it's fine.

What we want to do here is actually saute the potato a little bit to put a dash of oil all around the potato.

We are doing a mixture here of potato and spinach in there.

So, saute the potatoes, you really don't cook them at that point.

All you want to do is to have them shiny and covered with the oil.

So that's about all you want to do.

And what we want to continue now is with the filling inside the potato, which is going to be spinach.

So I have spinach and a lot of sliced garlic here that we are going to cook together.

And I have washed spinach.

As you can see, the spinach is still wet from washing it.

And it is fine, that's what you want.

You want it a bit wet, so that the moisture in it will create a bit of steam and cook it this way.

So we put a little bit first, and I try at that point to twist it, that is to bring the garlic on top so that it doesn't burn in the bottom.

And more of my spinach.

A bit of salt and pepper on top of it.

And that's basically it.

I want it to cook this way now for a few minutes.

So I'm going to cover it until it gets, so it gets nice and wilted.

And then do the molding of the potato now.

I'm using a pan, a non-stick pan here, which is about 9-10 inch inch diameter.

You wanna brush a little bit of oil around, or spray it in there, and then arrange your potato.

See the idea here is to do a crusty bottom of potato, and arrange them in a pattern.

If you don't arrange them, is perfectly fine also, frankly.

But arranging them will give you a beautiful design on top when you unmold it, as you're going to see later.

So the idea is, again, to arrange the potato all around in the bottom flat.

Take the biggest slice of potato.

Here of course I'm not being too careful because I am in a hurry.

But otherwise, take your time to arrange a nice pattern, at least one layer.

That's the only layer that you see.

See the garlic, now it's softening up.

This is what I want, a little more.

So more slice of potato.

So now I have a bottom, which is prearranged.

So on top of this I can put a bit more potato in any old way, doesn't really matter, to make it a bit thicker.

And then my spinach.

The spinach here should fit right on top of it.

I may want normally to cook the spinach slightly longer so that I don't have any liquid left, you know?

So maybe one, two more minute would be good on this.

And finally, the rest of the potato on top.

And you don't have to arrange them here, you just want to cover them.

Remember, they're going to be turned upside down, so it really doesn't matter that much.

You put your potato there in one layer, press them a little bit, and that will go into the oven.

400 degree, about 35 minutes or so until you have a nice crust on top, which is what I have here.

I wanna make sure here, I could put that on the stove and shake it to be sure that it is moving, and it is here.

So the idea is just to invert it, here it is.

And it could have stayed slightly longer in the oven to brown a little more underneath.

Wanna put maybe a bit of chives on top of it.

And that will be the main course for today's meal.

And now let's do our first course, which is a mushroom stuffed wonton in a red wine sauce.

Could also be served as the main course or as the first course, one way or the other.

I'm putting a little bit of oil there with a dash of butter, just a tiny dash on top of it, and we're going to saute first some shallots and some leek in there, which will be the base of our mushroom.

The mushroom is going to be what we call a duxelles, type of duxelles mushroom.

I have different type of mushroom.

I have a portobello mushroom, the conventional white mushroom, the the Chanterelle, I have some oyster mushroom there, and also our fresh shiitake.

All of that, we're going to chop coarsely and just wash those mushroom.

So you don't want to wash them ahead, but you want to wash them at the last moment when you're ready to chop them.

So what we do then, I can break them coarsely in there.

It doesn't really matter that much.

Those, they're not too big, so they can go in there.

I have about 10, 12 ounces of mushroom here.

This is doing well.

And then you want to cut that.

What you want to do is do that with a pulse machine.

I have a pulse here.

And that's very good.

If you cook the mushroom, you let it turn, they are very light, they're going to start floating with the centrifuge force, they're going to go up, and the lower layer is going to get into a puree.

So you start and stop, stop and start to give a chance for the mushroom to fall back on the blade.

But it's particularly important if you do those type of wild mushroom.

So what we want to do is to saute that here, put a lid on top of it, cook it gently.

The liquid will come out of the mushroom.

And while this is cooking, I want to start the red wine sauce that I have for the same dish.

And what I have here, a little bit of oil again, some onion, chopped onion, garlic, chopped garlic, and fresh thyme.

I wanna put fresh thyme here.

All the leaves of the thyme are going to flavor it.

So that's going to be very nice.

Classic reduction that you do for red wine.

And then I'm using here a deep type of Zinfandel.

I have about half a cup to three quarter of a cup here and it has to reduce for a little while.

So while this is reducing, I wanna show you how to do the wonton.

So here I have the wonton right here.

What has happened is that my mushroom is fine now, but it's not ready.

So I have another one, which is cold, which has been sauteed and cold.

And what I have here, a few of those made already.

And I wanna show you how to make the others.

It's relatively simple.

We use those three inches square wonton skin, that's it.

And I use four of those.

I think I have two here.

Yes, they are quite fine.

Now they come in different thickness.

This happened to be a fine one.

So you can buy them, as I say, in different thickness.

So what we want to put here, it's approximately a tablespoon.

Yeah, a tablespoon, tablespoon and a half of mushroom in the center of it.

And then you want to water the other one carefully so that it glue together nicely, you know?

So you wanna be sure that it's well watered and then press it on top.

Start pressing it on one side, then the second side, then the third side, working this way so that you push the air out.

Only go to the last one at the end.

And you know, you can take a little container like this to press it all around, or you can press it with your hand.

And at that point also, I could very easily trim this with a knife, or trim it round, or trim it square, or cut the corner or whatever.

And if you do that, you can always keep the little pieces for to put in soup or whatever, like pasta.

So what I want to do here is to cook those.

They don't cook very long to cook.

About a minute and a half or so.

The concentration of the mushroom is great inside.

I can smell that duxelles.

And that duxelles is an old French recipe, which goes back to the middle age.

It was invented by a great French chef called La Varenne, which invented that recipe for one of his patron, whose name was Marquis d'Uxelles.

So what I want to do here is continue the sauce now that it's been reducing.

I put a little bit of tomato juice in there and a dash of soy for salt, you know, and to give me a bit of darker color.

This has to come back to a boil again, cook, and during that time, I wanted to show you, in the next few minutes, I'm going to do a caramel.

And I want to put water and sugar to start cooking my caramel here.

You put a minimal amount of water in there, bring that to a boil.

The caramel is going to take a few minutes to cook.

And while this is cooking, let's see if our wonton are basically ready.

I would probably want to arrange them nicely.

On top here, you can see that the duxelles mushroom is very visible now, right through, right through the skin of the wonton.

Putting them directly, I could have a towel on top of this, or actually what you can do also, when you rearrange them here this way is to sponge it a little bit to remove the excess water.

Now this came to a boil.

What I would want to do now is to emulsify this a little bit to get it very smooth.

The best way is to put it in there to emulsify the red sauce.

If you have more than that, you can go directly into the pan, but if you don't have a great quantity, it's easier to do it this way.

Emulsify it, you can have it even finer than what I'm going to do it in a puree.

And a beautiful rich red sauce with a few of the thyme flowers on top of it here.

My caramel is ready now.

I'm going to introduce you to my favorite sous chef, my daughter, Claudine.

- Hi papa.

- Hi, titin.

What we are going to do for that caramel, it's beautiful, now it has to cool off a little bit to get thicker.

And we're going to do caramel cage or caramel cup with that, right?

- Mhm.

- And crystallize flowers and stuff like that.

The caramel is nice now.

- Okay.

- So what I'm going to do, I'm going to do one, and you'll show me how to do the other.

I put that underneath, and what you want to do, you want to hold it like that straight and go from one side to the other, go outside a little bit, and you want to join, like when you build a house.

You wanna join one beam to the other beam so that it comes out together.

Now that's, I think this one is almost enough.

So you wanna do one?

- Yeah.

- Yeah, you better take this.

- Okay.

- But that don't get on your finger, otherwise your mother is gonna kill me.

(Claudine laughs) So that's good.

You go directly like this.

Terrific.

Now you're gonna make me look bad and do it better than me.

- [Claudine] I don't think so.

It was much easier when I was little and we used to do this in the snow.

- [Jacques] Well, that's right.

- [Claudine] There was no art involved.

I just threw it in the snow.

- [Jacques] That's right.

- [Claudine] Ate it from the snow.

- You can take a little more now.

Yeah, that was good.

We used to do caramel and go outside and throw it in the snow, in virgin snow, and make those long, fantastic shape there, you know?

- [Claudine] And it was a lot of fun to eat it, I think, personally.

- [Jacques] To eat it, yes.

Yeah, that's good, I think.

You see your caramel, you can always remelt it a little bit if it get too thick, but now it's getting a bit too thick.

So let's put it on the side here, it's cool enough.

And you can also put a little bit of water in that caramel, remelt it, and do a caramel sauce with it.

- Okay.

- But this has to take like a couple of minutes before it cool off.

So what do you do there?

- Okay, right now we're doing rose petals, and we have mint leaves, and we have basil.

And what you do is you take egg white that is kind of broken a little bit, and you put it in a plate and brush it flat, not to get too much on it, but to make sure it's all nice and wet on both sides.

And get any goop that's on here, put it in sugar, pour sugar on top, and flip it, and kind of saturate it.

It's a little bit hard with the rose petal, because you don't want it to break.

- [Jacques] But you want to press it.

- [Claudine] But you want to press it so that, oh, caramel.

- What is the green one you have here?

- That's mint, and there's basil here, and pansies.

And the rest are all rose petals.

- [Jacques] Is it all edible?

- [Claudine] Yes.

- [Jacques] All edible.

- Yes, make sure you only use edible flowers.

- Okay.

- And these are fresh from the garden, so there's no insecticides or pesticides on any of this stuff.

- So that's terrific, and those are, this is pretty hard, huh?

- Mhm.

Yep.

- I can't hear it breaking, you know?

So the one you do now, you have to let it dry overnight.

- Yes.

- I think that maybe.

- How long?

- I think, whoop, see that's sliding now, because this is a non-stick type of thing.

So it's good.

I'm gonna try to unmold one, right?

- Okay.

How long can we keep the petals for?

How long do they keep?

- [Jacques] Oh, five years, 10 years.

- [Claudine] Oh, well, there you go.

- [Jacques] No, I don't know how long you can keep them for, you can put them in like Tupperware, you know?

- [Claudine] Oh.

- [Jacques] That type of thing, and if they break.

Okay, here it goes.

Looks good, huh?

- Looks really nice.

- So you can put your ice cream inside, put that on top, or put that on the cup and put the ice cream on top.

You wanna try that one?

Well, you know what you can do also, if you don't want any of those long thing outside, you heat up a knife, just heat up a knife on top of the flame, and the knife is hot.

So you can cut the side if you don't want that.

So what you want to do is to push it a little bit from the side, and that's why you have long one, which go back and forth, so it corresponds.

- Okay, here we go.

- [Jacques] All right.

- [Claudine] Oh boy.

- You can feel it when it is going.

Yeah, go in a couple of place.

At some point you're going to feel it.

That's perfect.

- [Claudine] Oh yeah, this is, well.

- Push it from inside like this, you know?

- Well, it's just because it's your touch.

Had you not touched it, it would've broken.

- No, no.

We can re-glue the other one on it.

You could re-glue the other one actually you know, because if you had the heat there, yes, a bit of caramel softened, that will glue to it.

- [Claudine] That's perfect.

- All right, that's it.

So you've done all the one that you want here.

You can put that in like a Tupperware.

- And save it and use it for decorations later.

- Yes.

What do we put that on?

You put that on anything?

- On anything.

I mean you can put it on ice cream or banana splits, you can even put it in a frozen drink or something.

- I like the mint.

And that's basil, you do basil also.

- Basil, mint, do you want me to do another one?

- Do a basil there.

- Okay.

- Because I think that those are big leaves of basil here.

That's nice.

Oh, and that should have a good taste.

- [Claudine] And these are a little bit easier to do, I think, because they're not quite as delicate as the rose.

So you can press the sugar down more.

- You are doing a great job.

- Look at this.

- [Jacques] All right, you go ahead and you know.

- [Claudine] And then you press.

- [Jacques] I think we are going to serve the ice cream in there, okay?

- [Claudine] Yep.

- So do you want to get it, actually it's not ice cream, it's frozen yogurt, right?

- Yes, coffee frozen yogurt.

- Do you want to get it?

- Sure.

- Okay.

So what I'm going to do is to put that, as I say, you can put it, which one do I use?

Oh, I think I'm gonna use mine, or yours.

But we'll put it here.

As I said, the other one would be great on top.

You can put it like a cup like this.

- [Claudine] Oh, that looks really pretty.

- Oh, maybe we'll do that.

Okay.

- Okay, here you go.

- For that we do a nice scoop.

- Yes.

- It's frozen yogurt, so you have no guilt, right?

- [Claudine] No guilt, and also we don't eat dessert that much.

- Oh, and I'll tell you another thing too that people should be aware of, you cannot do that too much ahead because anything which is wet touching the caramel is going to start melting.

So that thing will melt in like four or five minutes.

Well the bottom will melt first, so you won't see it.

But do you wanna put something on top?

- Yeah, let's put this one on top.

- [Jacques] Lets' see, your mother would be really proud of you there.

And if you wanna put some more around there.

- [Claudine] Yeah, maybe we can do this.

- You wanna try to put this one on top, upside down?

They can look at it this way.

- Oh, okay.

- Can do a little chignon with that.

Put it behind your.

- Let's see.

- Yeah, you grab the, yeah, you grab the cup like this.

That's good, try.

Look at that cage.

- [Claudine] There.

- [Jacques] Yeah, that's beautiful.

- [Claudine] Hey, that's nice.

- We leave it like that or?

That's a lot of sugar.

- That's a lot of sugar.

Yeah, definitely.

- You did a great job.

- Thanks papa.

(gentle music begins) - It's always great for me to eat with the family and to eat with Claudine.

Now you're in college, so I don't see you as much as I used to.

But when you come home, we still eat together, right?

- We always eat together.

- And sometimes you invite me in your apartment in Boston.

- I don't cook quite as well as you do, but yeah, it's fun when you do.

- Well I don't know, you did a fantastic job there with this.

- Yeah, these are beautiful, and they're easy.

I don't eat dessert very often, so when I do, I like to make something that's a little bit more elegant, 'cause it's a special occasion.

- Yes.

So we have that on our plate, we start with the dessert.

- I think it's a good meal.

Great way to start.

- When in doubt, start with the dessert, right?

- Yes.

- Well we have, we do have a vegetarian meal, very elegant today, starting with the little wonton with a red wine sauce.

It's concentrated, very concentrated taste of the mushroom there.

It's good.

And what can you say about that potato?

You love potato, me too, right?

- I love potatoes, yes.

- Your mother likes rice better.

- Yeah, mom likes rice.

- We like potatoes.

- We like potatoes better.

- So what are you, you like spinach also?

- Yeah, my favorite vegetable.

Well that and Brussels sprouts.

- That and Brussels sprouts.

See, I raised your right.

- Yeah.

- So we have this, this is very filling.

We are going to have that with a nice salad.

We eat a lot of salad.

You and your godfather, my brother, salad.

Big bowl of salad and bread.

Can we eat without bread?

No.

- No, we shouldn't eat ever without bread.

- That's a good idea.

And I think that we're going to have a burgundy wine here.

This is a light burgundy.

Now you're old enough to enjoy wine.

I mean, even when you were smaller, you had a little bit with water, right?

- Yes.

- Now you're 26, so, oh, can I say your age?

- Yeah, I'm young enough, you can still say my age.

I don't mind.

- Okay, well this is good.

I really enjoy cooking with you, titin.

- I enjoy cooking with you, Papa, too.

Thank you.

- And you're going to teach your kid the same thing when you have kids?

- When I have them.

- When you give me some grandchildren.

- If I ever give you grandchildren, they will know how to cook.

- Okay, good.

- I promise.

- Well, I thank you, it's nice to be with you.

- Nice to be with you.

(glasses clink) - What's missing here is your mother.

- Yes.

- And I think we enjoy two of us working for you, right?

- Absolutely.

- And we'll do it again.

And I hope you do it with your family as I do with mine.

- [Both] Happy cooking.