- A traditional French sandwich is called a croque monsieur, and it's a ham and cheese sandwich.

When we do it with ham is called monsieur, when we do it with chicken, it's called croque madame.

So you put a good Monteleone cheese.

There you need, you know, quality cheese there, good ham.

You make a sandwich, you butter the outside on each side.

This and the other side.

About 10 minutes in the oven at 400 degree and it comes out this way.

So you can serve it as such, but for a fun thing you trim it on four sides, then you cut it the long way and across into nice tidbits to serve as hors d'oeuvres like this.

That's it.

You put your toothpick in it.

A classical recipe can be reworked to make a fun, tasty hors d'oeuvres.

I am Jacque Pepin and this is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

I love to do ratatouille in the summer, you know when the late summer and fall the vegetable are at their peak, they're exploding out of my garden.

And this is the type of stew that you do in southern France, you know, called ratatouille, mixture of eggplant, zucchini, tomato and so forth.

So we have a nice menu with that.

We're going to serve that with a pasta, but to start with, a shrimp with cabbage and red caviar, kind of elegant.

And a penne and ratatouille.

And a classic peach Melba to finish with.

And of course a couple of glasses of wine.

So I'm going to start with the ratatouille.

Now, the ratatouille, if you want, leave the skin on the eggplant or take it out.

You know, we have that type of pepper here.

You could have, you know, other types of green pepper.

It's fine.

We have onion, garlic, of course, and some people add the Herbes de Provence or other thing and you can, you know, add it.

It's similar also to the Italian caponata, except the Italian caponata is usually sweeter and it's got capers in it, I believe.

My wife makes caponata all the time.

So here it's coarsely cut.

A good dash, I mean, three, four tablespoons of olive oil with this, you know.

Maybe a little more onion, even.

About a good two cups of onion.

And, again, this can be varied as well.

You know, you like onion a lot, put more.

Okay.

Zucchini here.

Cut the end of it.

This you cut into a about three-quarters of an inch to one-inch pieces.

You know, it used to be that the classic ratatouille, we always cook the vegetables separate, you know, one thing and another and another.

This is the way I used to do it when I worked in Paris at the Plaza Athenee and Fouqet's, and that was back in the '50s.

So, a long, long time ago, barely remember it.

But I don't do it this way anymore.

I just put all my vegetables in there.

Maybe it's better if I put the heat on.

Yes, goes better.

About two cups, two and a half cup of this as well.

Here we are.

Again coarsely cut, you know?

I like the zucchini when they are smaller and quite firm.

I also like those type of eggplant which tend to have less seeds in the center, you know, than the large one.

Though there are so-called Japanese eggplant, there's also the Chinese eggplant.

But, you know, if you don't have the other one you can use your commercial eggplant is perfectly fine.

About all of the vegetable in there.

I put tomato.

You can have the fresh tomato of course, if they are around.

And then those type of cubanelle or Italian pepper.

You know, it's always interesting, when I use this, you know, I always taste those because sometimes they can be quite hot and sometimes quite mild.

So that will determine how much you put in it.

The seeds out.

Oh, yeah, close to end of there.

It's a beautiful stew, as I say, from the south of France, which we plate up the whole summer bounty of the garden, you know, all of those vegetable.

And it's very classic to go in a French household or certainly in the south of France, enough cold ratatouille usually serve cold or room temperature, really, and served with black olives or other type of olives.

So here we are.

I think that's fine here.

Garlic, cut the end of the stem like this.

When you cut the end of the stem you crush it a little bit.

That will release that shell, you know, on the outside.

And we crush it, just coarsely, you know?

Remember, this is will cook a good 30, 40, minutes, you know.

So that could be pretty coarse.

In there.

Okay, did I forget anything?

I didn't put any salt in there, of course.

So you put salt.

And it does take a fair amount of salt to season.

Pepper.

Okay, now it's going well, I'm going to cover it.

And that will cook about 30, yeah, 30, 40 minutes.

It's not that important, either.

Sometimes the vegetables will give you a lot of juice.

If there is too much juice, open your lid and boil it for three, four minutes to reduce the juice a little bit.

You can do that days ahead, you know.

Then the first course we have today is a great dish of cabbage and shrimp with caviar on top.

And we're using trout caviar or a salmon caviar that is a red caviar.

And I have about a cup of chicken stock in there and I'm going to start by cutting the cabbage right on top of it.

And this is, of course, as you can see, Savoy type cabbage, the curly type of cabbage.

And it's perfectly fine.

You cut it coarsely.

This is the same way that I would do, you know, a coleslaw.

(knife chopping) A bit on the side here.

(knife chopping) Because that's pretty tough.

I'll cut that in half and that's about it.

That's about six cups of cabbage, you know.

So we want to cook this for a few minutes until it gets wilted, you know?

And basically most of the juice, that is I have a bit of chicken stock, if you don't want to, you could actually put water in it, if you want to keep it more vegetarian.

We're gonna put garlic on top of this.

And this a nifty grater, you know.

There is different type of those grater and you can put and get your garlic right on top of it here.

Watch for your hand at the end, but you can keep that little piece, it's fine in there.

So a couple of cloves of garlic here.

Yeah, this is nice.

My wife likes this.

I don't dirty the table, I don't dirty the knife, anything.

So she likes it.

But you can see all of the garlic, you know, being here.

So bang it a little bit.

That's it.

So this is getting wilted already.

Cook it for about four, five minutes.

Well, let's check this out.

This is fine.

You can see that basically all of the liquid is gone here.

So this is basically what I want.

We put a bit of salt in there.

We put salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Okay.

So then we're going to put some cream in it.

I put about about three-quarters of a cup of cream.

And a little bit of French mustard as a thickening agent in there.

And we kind of boil that, cook that for a couple of minutes.

And add the shrimp.

Now we have beautiful shrimp here.

You can see if they come with the shell, the way you wanna shell them is bring this around.

And, again, this just to keep the tail.

Okay, I'm going to add a dash of wine in this.

(wine glugging) And my shrimp.

And this is going to cook in one minute, you know, two minutes, I mean, quite fast.

You don't want to over cook your shrimp.

I mean, you want them to be cooked.

And I'm gonna cover them and we're going to serve that with caviar.

This is American caviar.

I have a trout caviar here, which you'll see the grains are much smaller, and then the regular salmon caviar.

So you can see that the grain here of that caviar is actually much larger than this one.

This is the trout caviar, which is very good, too.

So this one there in the caviar, the trout, in the salmon caviar, rather.

If you look very closely, I don't know whether you can see it, but inside, very often, if you see a red dot in it, a deep red dot, it indicates that this is from the chum salmon, it's a type of salmon, the chum one.

And it's called natural and is considered the best of those caviar there.

So this is the one that I look for usually.

And often we have that, of course, with toast and with butter and so forth.

This is great.

Now, let's see what that looks like.

As you can see my shrimp are practically done.

Maybe another minute or so.

As Julia would say, "taste it."

So I'm tasting it.

Hmm, it's quite delicious.

Okay.

And you wanna serve that on a warm plate, of course.

And it's the type of dish that I would tend to serve on a plate rather than on the platter, because you arrange it the way you want to start with, and otherwise some people have two shrimp, some have four, they start yelling, they start fighting in the dining room.

So it's better to divide your shrimp right here.

Okay.

And it's about cooked enough now.

Notice that when I take a lid like that, I always put it down this way, never this way, otherwise the steam goes on the stove and I get yelled at, where in that case, I'll put it here.

So this is cooked enough.

I'm gonna put it right there and serve some of the cabbage here.

Beautiful green.

So it's a way, you know, people often don't think of cooking cabbage or lettuce, for example, the salad.

And I love to cook lettuce or romaine or cabbage.

If we have four per person there, it's more than enough.

You know, other main course, you know?

I mean, other first course.

Other main course, you can serve maybe one or two more.

Okay.

This and of course our caviar on top here.

There's going to be beautiful red dots all over the place.

And the saltiness of the caviar, yes, is going to go quite well with the cabbage and the shrimp.

Okay, and you can put a little piece of dill if you want on top.

Decoration will look quite nice here.

And this is a beautiful first course, very elegant.

The shrimp with caviar.

Okay.

Let's check on the ratatouille.

It's been going on very strong here, boiling.

Oh, and you can see that it basically, well, not quite cooked but, you know, we used also to serve the vegetable really, really in puree, that should be cooked.

It's not the type of vegetables you want crunchy, but we keep them now a bit firmer than we're used to.

Another five, 10 minutes, you know, it's going to be ready, so I might as well start my pasta.

I have penne rigate here.

I have three-quarter of a pound that I'm going to cook.

And this is an organic pasta, which is nice, too.

So I put that to cook.

I put salt in the water before.

Stir it.

And depending there is different size penne, you know, it goes from 12 to 15 minutes to cook and that's depending how you like it as well.

I mean, I like it a bit al dente, that is to the teeth.

But I don't like the penne when it's still raw dough inside.

It's time for the dessert.

So I'm going to get the ice cream.

And I'm going to do the classic peach Melba.

The peach Melba was developed by Escoffier, again, for Melba, which was the soprano from Australia.

He did actually a toast for her, a very, very thin toast.

And he also did that recipe which is done with a raspberry sauce.

So what I have here is seedless raspberry jam and a little package of so-called IQF raspberry.

That is individually quick frozen, no sugar added, nothing in it, unless I start putting sugar there.

I like to put directly the jam, you know?

(blender whirring) That makes for a very concentrated thing.

Now you can do that and serve it as such, but there is seeds in it.

You may object to the seeds, so we put it through the strainer.

We can do that.

And if you don't object to it, it's fine.

You can also actually do that in a food mill, you know?

And it's fine, too.

Now in your strainer like that.

You just bang your strainer to make this go through.

(ladle tapping) This is really what you should do.

And that strainer is a double-mesh strainer.

And actually I would rather have one with larger holes.

It doesn't need to be that fine and it's harder to make it go through.

But you do it this way.

The point is that if you start with your spatula by pressing, then each of those tiny seeds goes into one hole and it blocks the whole thing.

So first you make it jump like that to get most of it out and only at the end you start pressing it this way to get more out of it.

Okay.

Any case.

Get what you can from underneath.

And try not to mess up the table too much.

I have a beautiful sauce here, very unctuous.

So the classic peach Melba, you start, of course, with the ice cream.

And here, oh, I think we deserve at least a couple of scoops.

Those are small scoops, you know.

Ice cream this way You can press it.

Get a nice peach.

You can have one, even two peaches if you want, but one is nice.

I think those are canned peaches, makes it easier.

You can poach your own peach as well.

And we have the raspberry sauce on top.

Roasted, sliced almond, you know?

This is classic as well.

And this is the way it's served.

If you wanna make slightly fancier, then we could put a little piece of mint on top to make it more elegant.

And this is Escoffier's classic peach Melba.

Now let's see if my ratatouille is ready.

Let's see how much it's gonna take for the penne.

Still gonna take a few minutes.

The ratatouille is cooked enough.

When your water really boils for the pasta, you really should leave it open at that point, you don't have to cover it.

But make sure that it continues boiling.

Okay.

This is ready, also.

Nice and juicy.

So this is, as I said, served cold.

I shouldn't even say "cold," you know?

I like it kind of room temperature.

So just imagine that I had time to let it cool.

And this is the way we serve it conventionally.

You have it cold, so this is a hors d'oeuvres, you know?

Serve your ratatouille.

This is summer for me.

And I like to put stoned olives in there, you know?

Those are Kalamata.

And I also have the black so-called oil-cured olives.

You can see that the skin is shriveled on the outside and it's more gummy and all that.

This is very concentrated in taste, the oil-cured olive.

This is the Kalamata.

I love any of those.

So you stud the whole thing with the olives.

One or the other.

And now you want the best possible olive oil that you get.

This is an organic olive oil as well, extra virgin.

And now you put that on top.

And maybe a little bit of parsley.

Fresh parsley on top.

Couple of sprigs like this.

You get more of the summer or the spring.

You know, when I have all of this in my garden, I put herbs in everything, you know?

So here it is.

This is your classic ratatouille.

But as I was doing ratatouille, I love pasta with vegetables and I decided to do, you know, the pasta with a ratatouille.

Other sauce, other vegetable sauce if you want.

And so just imagine again that's cold.

You know, that's cold.

We have 12 ounces of penne in there.

So you would have a good for cups of ratatouille.

I put extra salt, remember, in there because we are going to put the pasta.

I put a great deal of pepper in there.

And what I would do at that point, when I'm ready to serve, I cook my pasta, I just have to toss it, put cheese in it.

I would put that in the microwave oven.

If you imagine this is hot, of course, but if it's cold, then you put it in the microwave oven two, three minutes, just to get it a little warm so that it doesn't shock the pasta being too cold.

Toss your pasta in it, you can serve it.

You know, with that type of dish, personally I love... With pasta, I always love to have a good red wine.

And this is what I have here.

This is a Shiraz, you know, a Shiraz from the United States and I like those types of wine, Rhone Valley types of wine.

Those are great.

This is going to go great with my (sniffing) that smells wonderful.

Prior to that, as I'm cooking, I probably would've had a glass of white wine as well.

Well the pasta is practically ready.

So I'm gonna grate some cheese on top of this here.

A beautiful Parmigiano Reggiano, you know?

In France when I was a kid, in the pasta, we always used Swiss cheese, you know?

But now I'm used to Parmigiano, so.

You can even put more after.

I'm gonna put olives in there and those are the oil-cured olives, you know?

More olive oil.

Now that's the olive oil for the pasta.

I can taste this, but it should be really over seasoned at that point because the pasta has to go in there, you know?

Mm, that is good.

Okay.

You know, each time that I do any type of pasta sauce, I use one ladle of the pasta liquid to put in the sauce so it makes it wet.

Not in that case, I have a lot of liquid here, so I drain it completely and add my pasta.

I can toss it around, you know?

That's good.

Bring all that to the table.

Good.

We can have, of course, some basil on top or parsley.

Probably I would put basil.

It's nice and moist.

With all the vegetable on top here.

Maybe a little more of this.

I put basil very often from the garden, you know, I just break it like this and put it on top rough like this.

It's nice and simple.

And that's it.

The penne and ratatouille, perfect with that wine.

I hope you're going to do that summer meal for your friends.

You're gonna do the ratatouille and use it one way and use it the other way.

And, remember, this is the indication of summer.

You would love to do it.

I love to make it for you.

A great make ahead dinner for friends.

Happy cooking.