- I love those large butter beans and I use them very often.

I drain them out, a little can of butter beans, and you add some garlic to it, you get some onion to it, a little bit of herbs, parsley, chives, whatever you have, you know, salt and pepper, of course.

Lemon juice and a little bit of mustard, French mustard.

This way, olive oil, and that's it.

You have a great dish here that often I serve and an accompaniment to meat or even to fish, but more often than not, I just serve it like that as the first course kind of canopy and it's great to eat this way.

It's healthy, it's delicious.

Butter beans canopy, make your pantry work for you.

I'm Jacques Pépin and this is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

(pan sizzling) I have Spanish flavors today, we have a tropical finish.

This is the menu of today, and I started already.

I have beautiful chorizo here.

This is Spanish chorizo, you know, very reddish.

There is a lot of paprika in there and that's why it get reddish like that, very flavorful.

And I brown there for about four or five minutes and I add some chicken leg with it without the skin, and we're going to continue with the whole garnish of the paella, the paella cook, the classic Spanish dish, you know, it's a whole meal in itself, and I love to do that summer and winter.

So onion in it, the proportion are relatively important, but at least I would say, yeah have a cup, 3/4 cup of onion in there.

(pan sizzling) And then a lot of other things are going in, mushroom.

So about a cup of mushroom as well.

You can have wild mushroom as well as domestic mushroom.

(knife tapping) And again, cut coarsely like this.

It's not very, very important for that.

Now we have shellfish with this that will be cooked at the end, but for the time being, we start with all of the vegetables, so first browning the sausage and the chicken, then we continue with the vegetables, so onion, now I have three cloves of garlic here.

I'm gonna add the garlic, just crush it.

(hand pounding) And very costly coarsely chop.

(knife tapping) That will go in there.

I always get at my market also some red salsa so called and it's pretty spicy and I very often use it in ingredient like this.

And of course they have the rice.

It's a paella rice, which is a short grain, and that should go next because you wanna mix it in, in the fat in the bottom of this.

You wanna separate it like that, mixing with the fat.

And of course, the advantage of that type of thing is that you can start, you know, you can start earlier browning your chicken doing all of this and like 30 minutes before your guests are getting there, then you can add all of the rest of what I'm doing now, so you can really do that ahead.

(spoon tapping) Okay, so there, I'm putting a little bit of the salsa.

I have some tomato here.

And I have alcaparrado.

It's a mixture of alcaparrado and it's a mixture where you have garlic slice in it, you have red pepper in it, you have olives in there.

This is a classic Spanish mixture and I'm putting some of it (spoon tapping) in there for the special accent.

And of course, we don't wanna forget saffron.

And the saffron here is the stigma or the pistil of crocuses and it takes about 40,000 or 45,000 flowers to make a pound of saffron, so saffron is very expensive, but it goes a long way.

So here the saffron will come from a different part of the world.

In fact Iraq too, but I think that the best one is probably the one from Spain, all right, and that's what I do.

When I go to Spain, at the airport I buy saffron.

Okay, so this is all mixed in there.

And now I have to add my liquid.

(pan sizzling) (spoon tapping) So the liquid there is chicken stock.

(pan sizzling) And the chicken stock doesn't really have any salt.

I should taste it.

You can see the beautiful color.

This is a copper kind of paella pan and I would wanna cook it in there and just serve it on the table into that thing.

Let me taste it.

Gonna need a bit more salt.

Okay, so that will come to a boil and the rice will come first for about 10, 12 minutes before we put the shellfish in it, and finally some peas at the end.

You can put asparagus as well and so forth.

So here I'm covering it.

Okay.

Next we stay in Spain.

There we are going to do a classic gazpacho, and the gazpacho is the quintessential summer soup, you know, cold soup, and when the garden is exploding with cucumber and tomato and pepper and so forth, and that's what we're going to do here, and I will start by peeling the cucumber.

When you peel anything long like this, the first thing is to trim the end of it.

And after you trim the end of it, you can hold it this way.

And now you have a platform here so you can do that with one streak.

One streak like that and you make it pivot on your hand.

This is the proper technique to peel something.

Split in half.

You can see the seed though, they are not seedless cucumber.

Actually even the seedless cucumber, frankly, I remove the seed.

Okay, now to remove the seed, one of the mistake I found, people go with the spoon like that and break the cucumber.

Use the edge of the spoon, go around the edge, and turn on the other side or on the other edge.

That removes it without breaking the cucumber.

Okay.

So, for this we need about maybe a good 1/2 cup for four people there.

A good 1/2 cup of little diced cucumber, which are going to be used (knife tapping) as a garnish when you serve your cucumber, so here it is, should be fine, first garnish there.

And the rest of the cucumber, I don't have to worry too much.

I can cut it actually (knife tapping) coarsely.

(knife tapping) So I can cut, I have garlic here, two clove of garlic.

I'm going to cut a bit smaller too and I can start putting this in there.

Okay.

Next ingredient in there I have my cucumber, pepper.

Now the pepper here, it's good if you can peel it, and I can peel it with this, as you can see, this is our great vegetable peeler.

And I can go all around and peel the pepper.

Now of course, you can see that I cannot go into pleat where I have the pleat, so what you do after, you cut where you have the pleat here to remove this so that now, now I can expose the side here and finish peeling it.

It is much better certainly as a garnish to peel your pepper.

It's less important in the one who goes into the soup, but for the garnish, this is better to do it this way.

That will be my garnish.

The rest I don't have to worry too much.

I can break it into pieces.

That goes in there.

This one here, garnish of the soup, so this is the type of soup you do in summer, very refreshing, a kind of salad soup if you want.

Okay, I have my second garnish now right here.

Remember, they are peeled, does make a big difference.

Much more delicate.

The skin, we have no use for it, more cleaning.

Now onion.

So a little bit of the onion I want, again, as a garnish.

(knife tapping) I wanna cut it coarsely.

(knife tapping) Oh, I mean finely, rather.

(knife tapping) I have enough onion here.

Now if I were to leave that onion like this, within 10 minute the sulfuric acid in onion is going to sting your eyes and it start discoloring, so when you serve that as a garish for a gazpacho or caviar or a steak tartare, any of this, you put that in a sink and you rinse it under cold water.

That's it.

That wash out that compound of sulfuric acid.

And those onion will stay white and fluffy for like two days if I need it for two days, so drain them out a little bit, and I have nicely chopped onion here, again as a garnish, that's my third garnish.

The rest of it can go in there.

That's enough.

(strainer clunking) A little more onion (knife tapping) for this.

(knife tapping) We're building up, building up the gazpacho right here.

Now tomato, same thing with the tomato.

You know, I will use, well, you'll take the core of the tomato there, and basically put about pound, pound and a half of tomato.

Cut it in half.

The seed and the juice, I can put in there.

And then keep a little bit of that for garnish.

I may have enough with this, so the rest of it, again, cut coarsely.

(knife tapping) In there.

Okay, that's plenty.

Now I will cut this again as the garnish.

(knife tapping) Yeah, this is plenty.

You wanna serve about two, three tablespoon of the garnish per person.

Be enough here.

(knife tapping) So you don't lose anything.

Okay, this is the fourth garnish.

Good.

Now we're ready to make the soup, salt on it.

Amount of salt, pepper, and... (lid clunking) (food processor whirring) And in this... (food processor whirring continues) As a liquid, I like to add a little bit of, you can put tomato juice, but I like to put Bloody Mary mix, which is really spicy, so that goes well with it.

With a cup of it or so, let's see.

(food processor whirring) (Jacques vocalizing) (food processor whirring continues) And olive oil.

Good.

(food processor whirring continues) Now you could serve it just as such and it's perfectly fine.

If you wanna be a bit finer then you can strain it, strain it because there is still the seed of the tomato and so forth, and if I strain it, I do it into a food mill like this, and remember that the food mill is kind of rough on this side and this is the side who goes down this way, not the other side.

This is the fine blade.

There is usually three blade and those are very handy.

I mean, I use them very often at home.

Okay, three leg.

But as I say, if you decide that you want it with a bit of seed in it, it's okay.

Could be emulsified a little more, actually.

(handle clattering) That be creamier this way.

Okay.

(handle clattering) Some people play tennis, some jog.

I use a food mill, I use a whisk.

That's what I do for exercise.

Okay, that's about fine.

So clean up the bottom.

(spatula tapping) All right.

Nice, smooth, creamy mixture.

I want to taste it.

I think it's just about right.

There is enough salt.

There is enough everything.

You can remove a little bit of the foam if you want on top, just for look really.

And that of course is more than enough for four people.

Okay, do we want to serve this (dish clanking) in there?

(soup sloshing) I could actually.

(bowl clonking) There is one portion.

(dishes clanking) I will probably mess it up, but maybe not, but here it is.

And then you put, of course, all of the different garnish that we have here at the table for people to help themself.

Plus, some crouton, you know, that I have here.

And what I do for the crouton, I cut a day-old bread and I put a little bit of herbs de provence.

The herbs de provence is a mixture of different type of herb, thyme, marjoram, basil sometime, and sometime lavender flowers as well, you know, and savoring there.

I mix it in there, a bit of olive oil, and in the oven.

That's a way of using your leftover bread and it's great with that soup.

Okay, this soup is nice and cool.

I like it cool, but not ice cold, and maybe a little sprig of dill, dill or something else in the decoration on top and this is it.

Now I think it's time to go back to the paella and let's see what's going on here.

Yeah, that's pretty good.

I think my rice is practically cooked, I can taste a piece of it.

Still a bit hard, but then now it's time to put the shellfish in it.

So I have scallop here.

Those are large scallop, as you can see.

So four or five scallop or one per person, and you can serve your scallop this way, or here there is a little, a kind of tendon which is on the side here.

You can remove it but it's fine in it too.

And then the shrimp, couple of shrimp per person.

I'm going to have here the shrimp are in the shell, give me a bit more taste, you know?

Push them a little bit into the rice.

And finally the mussel here, and my mussel, as you can see, for example, that mussel is open here.

If I bang it like this (knife tapping) and I see the mussel is closing, as you can see it's closing here, so the mussel is alive.

It's just that it's opening for air, so it's fine.

So you can put your mussel on top.

(mussel shells clinking) I can increase the heat a little bit.

Okay, I'm going to put a little bit of peas in it, the end and the peas, those are the baby, tiny peas, frozen, they are perfectly fine, those.

In a couple of minutes, when the shellfish start cooking.

Well, this will take another a couple of minutes before the shrimp turn really red and the mussel open.

Give me a bit of color there.

That's nice.

And cook another minute or so.

And with this, you know, I have an Italian wine here, you know, Fiano from Puglia, but with the paella myself, I would have a red wine.

Should probably have a tempranillo, a wine from Spain.

This happened to be a merlo from California and it will be very, very good as well, so I think that's what I'm going to taste.

Always taste it in case something is wrong with the bottle.

It's perfectly fine.

So I think I'll put a bit of parsley in there.

Just, you know, coarsely (knife tapping) chop like this and we are ready.

The best way to serve the paella is to put it right in the middle of the table, everyone help themself, and that's it, and it should be crusty in the bottom, which I hope mine is here.

Here we are.

The big paella for four, is probably end of for six or eight.

Okay, now the dessert, and the paella is pretty powerful and consistent and we started with the gazpacho, which can be fitting also with all the garnish, so we have a very simple fruit dessert here, and the fruit dessert is pineapple this time.

Basically made as either fruit dessert, or chocolate in one way or the other.

So we'll remove this.

This is a ripe, you want your pineapple to be ripe when you get it.

We actually need only half of that pineapple here.

That half is okay and you could use a small knife now to get all of the little eye out.

The best ever that I've had was in Puerto Rico, and in Guadalupe as well, you know, some long one, long tube one which are really good.

So there, we're gonna take the center core out of it.

It's kind of woody in the center, although when I do it at home, my wife eat that first.

That's what she like.

Okay.

And then we can slice it.

Thin slice again, you can do that ahead, you know?

(knife tapping) To marinate it or macerate it a little bit in there, what I like to put on this is really honey.

And have a good honey here.

This is a nifty pourer, you know?

In a few minutes, the honey will eventually melt with the rest of the ingredient.

What I have is dark rum.

The dark rum is classic with the honey.

I have another eye here.

So a little bit of a dark rum.

You can actually mix all of your ingredient in there.

But if you're going to marinate it for a while, it's fine to do it the way I'm doing it.

So let's put a little bit of the skin of lime on top of it.

This is a great thing to use, you know, that microplane it's called.

(lime scratching) And I can see the lime there, I can feel it in my hand.

I know there is not much juice in that lime bit it's really hard.

So if you want to have more juice, you drop it in boiling water for a couple of seconds, or you crack it on the table like this to try to crack a little bit of the fiber, or you put it in the microwave oven as well.

Okay.

Yeah, I can see sometimes they are really cottony, you know, very cottony and you don't get much out of it, so you can start with this as well.

Okay, here, again.

Okay.

Very fresh, very fragrant, very simple dessert you would want to let it marinate for an hour or so, you know, it would be nice.

And then basically what you want to do is just make a ring out of this, nice ring of pineapple all around.

That would be more than enough here, some juice.

And in the center, to gild the Lily, as we say, a little bit mascarpone.

That's great and you can serve that, even with a little piece of the lemon skin on top just for color right there, that finish the dish.

I hope you enjoyed it.

I mean, that menu was perfect for a party and you can prepare it, most of it, I mean, the gazpacho can be done ahead.

This of course is even better when it's done ahead, and most of your paella can also be done ahead with you know, the finishing at the end so you have more time to spend with your guests and be the life of the party.

Happy cooking.