- This is a recipe you can't beat, and a great first course.

You can cook your own beets, or open a can of beets like this, drain it, put the slice in there, salt, pepper, a lot of ground pepper in there, and of course sour cream in the bottom.

Mix it in your sour cream, and place it directly on top, or either radicchio or in that case, I have beautiful endive here.

The color is great, goes well with it, it's easy to make, it is delicious, and all you have to do is to put a little bit of green on top of it.

And here we are, I'm Jacques Pepin, this is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

I'm going to do an apple, nuts, and apricot crumble today.

Peel the apple, as you can see, I use my thumb as a pivot here, and use a sharp knife, I mean a lot of people will use a vegetable peeler, I do too, but I'm used to use a knife.

And for that particular dessert, I like a soft apple, you know, macoon, stamen, backhand touch, any of those soft apple are good for that.

Cut it in two, and again, using your thumb as a pivot, you do the same thing.

Be sure to have your thumb there, otherwise you go right into your hand.

Then here we cut in two, and in three, and you can see I have added to that apple, look at those apple, I peeled them a few minutes ago, they're all discoloring already.

You can avoid that by keeping them in water, with a bit of salt in the water, or a bit of lemon juice, or orange juice, but I wanted to show you that it really doesn't matter whether they discolor or not, for what we are doing here, discoloration will disappear by the time they go into the oven.

So cinnamon in it, orange juice, the nuts, and the apricot, those are dry apricot, and that's about all there is to it.

So this, we're going to toss it together, and then put it into that roasting, that gratin dish here.

And I can do a small one, if I have too much, that will be for the cook in the kitchen.

But it can be pretty full.

Oh, maybe I'll put all of it, packing them up on top.

That's it.

And now, the dough, the crumble, to put on top, and this is quite a rich dough that you wanna do there.

Remember, we didn't put any butter or anything in this, so I have a stick of butter here, which is soft, and about a cup of flour, or three quarter of a cup, a bit of baking powder, and sugar.

Actually, I didn't put any sugar in there, I need sugar in this also.

About the same amount, I have a third of a cup in the dough, and a third of a cup on my apple, and it's fine.

Okay, now, this just have to be mashed together.

If your butter is soft, it should go quite easily.

Those are those type of dough that you do in summer with different type of berry.

In that case here, we're doing with apple, but you can do them with pear, or, of course, strawberry, raspberry, boysenberry, blueberry, which, of course, you follow the season.

It's the best thing to do.

See, that will gather together pretty fast.

I have a little bit of baking powder, will give some softness, and also some airiness to the dough, you know?

It won't be too dense together.

This is not the type of dough that you roll, you know, the type of dough that you break into pieces like this, and you place right on top of your fruit.

So it's pretty coarse, country-style-like.

I didn't wanna put my finger in it, so I have my finger in it.

So now, my finger are messed anyway.

Okay, and this goes into the oven, about 400 degree, for like 35, 40 minutes.

(upbeat music) Today is mushroom day.

We're going to do a menu with mushroom veloute with almond, Aston beef tenderloin stew with button mushroom, and a mushroom and resin chutney.

So this is a great day for mushroom, and I do use a lot of mushroom.

But I tell you, out of all of those wild mushroom at the market, which are usually very expensive, by far the most underrated species of mushroom is right this one, the button mushroom, the white mushroom that you find in store.

It usually, or very often, are more taste than oyster mushroom or other fancier and more expensive species that you find in supermarket.

Certainly, 40 years ago when I came to America, there was not even those type of mushroom in the supermarket.

I remember going to a store on mid-Manhattan, where I live, on 50th and First Avenue, and asking for mushroom.

And they send me to aisle five, what can mushroom?

At that time, you had to go to a specialty store to get mushroom.

And now, any supermarket will have five, six, seven, eight, 10 different type of mushroom.

But as I said again, this one here is really very underrated.

Now, people very often want to buy it very tight together, the small, you know, tight button mushroom, which is fine.

But when it start opening, and you can see the gill, the black around, the mushroom get older and open, it has even more flavor.

So very often, in the back of the supermarket, when they have leftover vegetable, I go pick up a whole package of vegetable for like 80 cents, because they are black and open.

Those have more taste than the button mushroom very often.

So today is our great mushroom day, and we're going to do great recipe with it.

And now, the main course today is going to be a filet of beef, we call tenderloin, with a whole array of vegetable.

But the way we're going to do it, it's kind of an instant stew.

All of the ingredients are put together at the last moment, and we'll start with the vegetable here.

I have a potato, which I'm going to peel.

Always peeled toward yourself, using your thumb, you know, to direct.

This is the way I was told as an apprentice.

And I'm still afraid that if I don't do it the right way, the chef is going to be behind me to kick me in the rear end, you know?

So I try to be careful.

So here, we cut that into about inch, inch or three quarter of an inch pieces.

Potatoes tend to stick, you know, like this, because of the starch.

And that's very often the reason why you want to wash your potato, to remove some of the starch, so they don't stick too much in your skillet.

I have baby carrot here.

Some of those are just the right size, some of those are a bit too big, so you cut them in half, two of them about equal size.

So here, olive oil, piece of butter, and I have more potato done here.

You're gonna wash your potato, as I say, in water.

Take some of the starch out.

You'll be surprised if I were to remove those potato by hand.

At the bottom of that bowl with the water, I may pick up like a teaspoon of potato starch.

And this, so here is my potato.

The potato also will discolor when you leave them outside.

And very often in professional kitchen, we blanch the potato.

When we want to saute them, you blanch them like a minute in water, not even 30 seconds, then they don't discolor anymore.

Then you saute them after.

So here, I have a nice, beautiful skillet here, or saucepan.

We call that a sautoir in copper on the outside because we mess up the whole thing in there at the end.

So I have, I have the carrots.

Here is my potato.

And mushroom.

You can see mushroom here.

I'm doing a lot of mushroom in that menu.

Now the controversy is whether you wipe your mushroom, which you shouldn't, whether you should wash them or not.

I wash the mushroom.

Now this is not the idea of washing or not washing the mushroom.

The idea is not to do it ahead.

It's not to do it.

You do it only when you're ready to use it.

You take them out and you use them.

If you do them ahead, they start getting brown, discolor and so forth.

Okay.

So let's see what we have here.

I have my potato.

This is on high.

And my mushroom.

So this is the base of our stew.

And this I wanna cook partially covered to let a bit of the steam evaporate like this.

About seven, eight minutes.

I want them brown also, but tender, just the right way.

And now I'm gonna put the mushroom.

Next, I'm going to do a kind of a chutney of the mushroom.

I have those mushroom here and it's relatively easy to do.

And I do those with wild mushroom as well as those.

And they keep for weeks in the refrigerator and I use it to serve as a garnish for cold cut, for roast, for poultry and so forth.

So we have this in there.

I'm gonna put a little bit of chopped onion in there and it really doesn't matter the way you chop your onion here because they can be slightly coarser also.

This is fine here.

I have a couple of clove of garlic in there.

Again, the same way.

Well, one clove is enough here.

This is a large one.

I don't want too much garlic in there.

Okay, I have raisins.

I have seed, mustard seed.

And you have the black one or those.

I like those for that dish, the raisins.

A bit of olive oil.

We're gonna put bay leaves in there and a little bit of ginger.

Can take a piece of ginger like this and you can actually using a spoon, you know, scrape it with a spoon like this.

Actually, I'm going to chop it very fine and even if I didn't peel it at all, it would be okay in this, as you can see.

The ginger will work out quite well like that, especially if it's a young ginger like this one is.

White wine.

One teaspoon, maybe a bit more.

A couple of tablespoon, dash of salt.

Pepper in it.

A dash of vinegar also to get me a bit more acidity.

And a little bit of tomato paste.

And of course, I put some sugar in there.

So here is my sugar in there.

This has to come to a nice boil.

Cover it and this should simmer about five, six minutes.

Should be enough and then when it cool off, it will get thick enough.

You can put it into a jar, keep it in your refrigerator for a couple of weeks.

And now that the vegetables are cooking nicely, we're going to do another dish with mushroom.

The first course of the meal, which is a veloute of mushroom and almond.

As you can see, my soup is basically finished here.

And what I did was actually very easy.

Put a piece of butter in a saucepan, melt it.

(upbeat music) Then you add shallot and garlic.

Saute it for a few seconds.

Then add a little bit of flour on top.

Chicken stock, salt, pepper.

And you bring it to a boil.

Add a piece of tree here, the dry mushroom.

And add the chopped mushroom.

And then you wanna cover, bring it to a boil and partially simmer for about 10 minutes.

Then remove the tree here, simmer it partially covered for about 30 minutes.

You can see that that piece of tree here, which is very soft now, is much larger than what I put in.

What you do is actually a garnish.

It gives some taste to the soup, but particularly the crunchiness of it is great to go as a garnish on top of the soup.

So this is what I did here.

That will go as a garnish along with those slivered or sliced salmon, rather, which I browned into the oven or in a skillet.

So the next thing you want to do, a puree out of this.

And this is a nice nifty machine to do that.

You want to do it as creamy as you want.

I like it pretty creamy.

And then we put half and half in it, about a cup of half and half.

And that's it.

My veloute is ready.

This is very intense taste of mushroom.

And you want to serve about that much per person.

With the sliced salmon around and a little bit of those black mushroom.

(soft music) Let's see.

Oh, the mushroom are beautiful now.

Nice and thick.

And they will get thicker as they cool off.

So there are plenty.

Can put them on the side.

And now we're going to do, right here, we're going to do the meat, which is going to go with my vegetable.

So, a beautiful piece of fillet here.

And that piece of fillet can be cut in slice.

Now you can use any tender piece, the so-called New York strip, which is also called loin strip and strip loin, as well as club steak, Delmonico steak, depending where you're in the country, will be good for that too.

Actually, even a skirt steak, anything that you consider quite tender will work with this.

We're doing an instant stew.

I have done that stew with lamb as well.

And it's a great way of doing it at the last moment.

So I cut them into a fairly large piece here.

And I'm going to put olive oil in there.

Butter.

And we're going to sear the meat in there.

Okay.

Now my meat, I want to have a lot of pepper on top and salt.

And that's it.

The pan really hot.

And in that particular instance, you would not really want to use a non-stick pan.

And the reason is that on a non-stick pan, the crystallization of the meat, the juice tend to stick to the pan.

And there, I want the juice to create a little bit of a juice, a sauce at the end.

Here is all of my vegetables here, which are nice and brown.

In this, I'm going to add peas to it.

I have peas.

Those are fresh peas right out of the cub, you know.

Those are beautiful.

They'll cook in a few minutes.

A little bit of onion.

All of that while the meat is finishing cooking.

That's it.

Onion in there.

And garlic.

But I have different clove of garlic here, the standard garlic.

And this one, which is the very large one that we call elephant garlic.

Some are even bigger than that.

Those are very mild.

You can use a vegetable peeler for that, you know.

And you can cut, you know, sliver of garlic like this, which is really nice.

Sometimes I do that in a salad.

I do sliver of garlic and I saute it in olive oil until they are, you know, brown and crisp.

And eventually, I put them on top of a salad.

Can do that with a knife too, but certainly those vegetable peeler are terrific for that.

We have all of those sliver of garlic, which I'm going to put in there.

Let's see the meat.

Meat is browning nicely here.

You don't want to cook it too much.

It's a filet of beef.

So it's about ready.

I will finish that up with a bit of chives on top.

And that's certainly the fastest stew that you'll ever make.

So here, I have my meat, the vegetable.

I'm going to add my meat directly to the vegetable.

In the juice of the meat, I'll deglaze it with a little bit of red wine or white wine or chicken stock.

Any of this, to finish it up, you'll have a natural juice in there.

Let's put it on top.

Again, you stir your stew together with the fresh vegetable, your chives.

This is a real easy stew.

Takes a few minutes to make.

You can serve it directly in that beautiful copper container here with the mushroom.

And conventionally, those mushroom are served cold or cool, at the most lukewarm.

And as I said, they will get slightly thicker as they cool off.

But they are a great chutney-like thing, you know?

Here they are, that ragout of mushroom and the stew of beef.

(soft music) The beautiful is still quite hot.

Now, you may not wanna serve it that hot, but even like that, it's really, really good.

So I have my stew here, which of course you can leave into that beautiful cocotte or then serve it also in a platter like this.

Put the carrot on top.

I see those crystallized carrots here.

Sounds good.

And with my beef stew, I'm going to enjoy a deep red Cabernet Franc from Napa Valley.

I enjoy making it to you.

Cook it for your friend, you'll enjoy it.

I'm going to have one of those here.

Mm, it's really good and hot too.

But that easy stew, I know you're going to do it for your friend.

I enjoy making it for you.

Happy cooking.