- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

You know my idea of good cooking is big taste, not big budget.

In fact, I get a real kick when I make a terrific meal that tastes like a million buck but cost only a few penny.

Even now I plan to do it today.

A savory soup loaded with vegetable and vermicelli, spicy pork sausage wrapped in cabbage leaf, grilled over a fire and served on a bed of lentil and a warm tasty dessert; baked Anjou pear with figs and apricot preserve.

Big taste on a small budget coming up on "Today's Gourmet".

(jazzy music) (jazzy music continues) I love to cook for no money.

Remind me of my mother.

And when we were a kid she could cook big meal, big taste, you know, on a very small budget.

And it's not because you have a small budget that it has to be draggy food or it has to be uninteresting or unattractive or not nutrient.

On the contrary, we're doing a terrific soup today.

Soup is one of my favorite and I have all kind of ingredient here.

As you can see, I'm going to have yam in it.

I'm going to have zucchini.

I have onion here.

I have mushroom, carrot, leek and we're going to thicken it at the end with some pasta.

We can use other thing.

The first thing that I wanna clean up that leek, cut the end of it.

People tend to waste out of the leek, they just cut it here.

No, I waste nothing out of the leek.

Cut the first line, you know, if it's tough and fibrous like this one is and even this I keep for stock.

The second one I'll cut it about here.

I look at it and I see this get tender to about probably here and this one here and so forth.

This one here, you can see that the leek is getting lighter in color inside, a greener, you know, a lighter green.

And that indicate that it is more tender.

So this I keep for stock.

I wash it, keep it for stock and I use my leek this way.

You have to split the leek in half, stand it up like that is the best way.

Go right through and split it right to open it and then in the center of it, as you can see, it's nice and tender but you have all the dirt, so that I have to wash.

So I'm going to wash it right here.

And you know a leek like that, a large leek, does quite a lot with it.

There is nothing which beat the taste of leek.

You know, you can use the scallion and you can use the onion and it's fine, you know, but it doesn't exactly have the taste of leek for me.

So we're going to start with a little bit of olive oil here and I have some onion.

I'll start with the onion and the leek to brown in there.

The leek, cut it in half, gather it together here and we're going to slice it into pieces.

One of the greatest dish for me is leek vinegarette, you know, and again, talking about budget, I cook leek in water.

I keep the water and I put pasta in it to make a soup and I remove the leek and do that with a kind of mustard sauce, you know, a good mustard, a bit of vinegar, some olive oil.

It's terrific, especially if you serve it lukewarm, you know?

So that, we put that in there.

I bet you that that leek has at least two cup, two, two and a half cup.

So I have a lot of green vegetable, root vegetable as well as above the earth vegetable, you know?

So this mushroom, you know, very often on a budget, I'll go to the supermarket where I live and I go to a corner of the supermarket where they have leftover vegetable and often I'm going to buy mushroom this way.

The mushroom are getting a bit soft, they're getting a bit black underneath.

Fine, they are terrific for saute, for soup.

In fact, the mushroom, which are a bit dark underneath have more taste than the button mushroom.

It's like a fruit, you know, which is older and has more taste.

So we have our vegetable, I have a little bit of butter in that soup that I could put now.

And if you want to omit it, you can even omit it.

I have a tablespoon.

You can also put it at the end, a good idea too.

Put it at the beginning because at the end I tend to forget it, so... Okay, the rest of the vegetable here and you know, it doesn't have to be exactly what I have here, you know?

I have a zucchini and carrot and so forth.

This seems a lot, but it's going to melt in the cooking process a lot, you know?

Whatever you have, cabbage, onion in your refrigerator, that's what I put in soup.

The water now, stir it and add water.

I like water with the soup because it has a nice frank taste with vegetable, you know, and I feel I taste my vegetable better.

Cover it.

You wanna bring that to a strong boil and after that you want to let it simmer, boil gently for about 10 minutes, you know, and that's important.

Now on this side I have one which is finished cooking now.

About cooked.

And as you can see it's quite colorful and the vegetable, a lot of water comes out of the vegetable, that's why it slowed down.

And I want to thicken it at the end with a bit of that pasta here.

This is angel hair pasta.

Now you can use other type of thickening agent and just crush this and sprinkle it in it.

You know, maybe two of those will be more than enough.

You don't really have to do it, if you don't wanna put pasta.

Sometime I have leftover pasta in my refrigerator and that's what I put in there, you know, at the last moment.

Or bread, if I have bread leftover from yesterday, that's what I use, other thickening agent.

Again, cover it and you can cook it for about four minute now.

And during that time I wanna talk to you about our main course, which is going to be made with lentil.

And I have some lentil for you here.

The lentil that I have here, those are standard, normal lentil.

They are very inexpensive.

We pick them any stone that you have on top of it, you have to be careful.

Lentil are very, very high in fiber and in protein, particularly for vegetarian.

You know, if you, today we're doing it with sausage, but if you're a vegetarian, the lentil will be terrific.

There's a lot of protein in it.

We wash them, put that in three cup of water, that's it.

And the seasoning in it, I'm going to put a bit of... (knife clicking) a bit of onion.

(knife clicking) About, well I have about cup of onion here, or so.

Onion is used in many, many dish.

I mean for me, I love onion.

I couldn't live without onion.

Garlic, we crush a little bit of garlic there.

(knife thumping) (knife clicking) Chop a bit of chopped garlic into this, a few bay leaf, you know, the bay leaf or bay laurel, get a lot of taste in there.

And those three cup, a dash of salt, and those three cup of lentil will absorb, I mean the lentil that I have here, after a point, will absorb those three cup of liquid, you know?

Just to finish about empty again, we don't losing anything.

So you bring that to a boil and that's going to cook for about 30, 35 minute.

You can see here I have all the type of lentil.

This is the one that I use today.

They are perfectly fine.

The pink lentil that unfortunately don't stay pink when you cook it.

This is Dal, D-A-L, type of thing that the Andean cook, the Andean use a great amount of lentil of different color.

This is a French lentil, we call lentilles du Puy.

It come from a town in the center of France.

It's dark green and very, very fine but unfortunately a bit more expensive.

Now I want to check on my soup and those pasta, you know, cook very fast.

And now I have a quite an earthy, you know, nice, terrific soup.

This is, if I had to choose one soup that I like more than anything else, I probably would say vegetable soup with either pasta or bread in it, you know?

And again, as I say, I put a tablespoon of butter, bit of oil, you can eliminate the butter and you will be left with a very, very low calorie type of dish.

Very high in fiber with all of those vegetable.

And it's done quite fast.

So we are going to do our recipe are for four and as you can see this is quite generous for four, so we'll have a nice bowl of soup here.

Beautiful color, maybe a bit of herb on top of it for color.

And this is our first course today.

And you talk about budget food, you know, there is nothing like soup for budget.

You can do a lot with what's left in your refrigerator.

Look at that here, I have a bunch of leftover vegetables, wilted tomato, I have some onion, I have a scallion, a piece of celery, a piece of carrot, a piece of zucchini, cabbage, any of this you can use it.

You know, the longest part to do the soup is to have the water come to a boil.

I have two cup of water coming to a boil here.

I can take a sheath grater, take any leftover of those vegetable, you know, and as I said, the first thing that I do, I put the water on the stove to come to a boil and it will take the time that I am boiling those vegetable, the water will barely be boiling.

Now there is a big other fallacy about soup.

As you can see the one that I've did before, you need water.

That is, I put water.

Many people think that there is no way you can do a soup if you don't have stock.

And that's not right too.

I, most of the time, I will use water.

I like the taste of water.

The second fallacy of course, is that people believe it has to boil for hours and hours.

And as you see in a vegetable soup, 10, 12 minutes of cooking, sometime even less than that, and that's enough.

I have the scallion.

I always have scallion in my refrigerator.

You know, cut that into pieces.

Of course the smaller you cut it, the fastest this is going to cook.

Celery is very good too.

I always have pieces of celery which are a bit wilted, you know, and it's fine.

People won't know it's wilted by the time it's cooked.

So you can see here, with like two cup of water, I have about two cup of vegetable here, a nice color too and very nutrient and a lot of fiber.

I can take this there, put that in and I tell you because it is grated fine on a grater like this, by the time it comes back to a boil, it's cooked, you know?

What do you do next?

You wanna build a thickening agent.

You can use this, like here I have tapioca so I can put some tapioca in it.

I can also put rice.

I have rice here or pearl barley.

Of course, if you put pearl barley, it takes a while to cook.

The rice also will take a while to cook, but a couple of tablespoon of tapioca like that are going to cook in three, four minute.

You have a terrific soup for no money at all, full of fiber and terrific to it.

And now I wanna show you how to make sausage, sausage with cabbage.

Actually I have a few which are made here and I'm going to put them on the grill right away to cook.

Huh?

Here, they're gonna take a little while to cook.

And while they are cooking, I want to explain to you how I made it.

Quite simple.

I have cabbage here and you can have, this is a beautiful Savoy cabbage, so it's nice.

Take the large leaf of that cabbage.

What we do actually, we put it into boiling water, you know?

And in the boiling water it will get wilted and that's what you want to do.

Wilted and slightly cooked and you will blanch it maybe five minute, you know?

That's what you wanna do.

And now the inside, I mean the sausage mixture.

I have here some ground pork.

And of course ground pork may be fatty.

It depend on the type of meat that you buy.

I like to ground it myself.

I ground this one and it's quite lean.

So if you really trim your meat a lot, then you know the meat can be quite lean.

Of course what you buy is pretty fatty.

If you really want it very, very lean, then you can do it with sausage or something else too.

What count is a nice, strong seasoning.

And I have here different type of seasoning.

I have those seed here and those are fennel seed.

And next to it I have cumin, cumin powder, then cayenne, which is very strong.

I have allspice and I have coriander.

All of that are strong seasoning.

And then to add moisture to the sausage, in addition, I put a little bit of... (knife clicking) I put a little bit of mushroom in it.

And I could have wild mushroom in there, of course.

On that budget food, I am more inclined to put a couple of mushroom that I may have left over or buy in the supermarket where they have wilted vegetable.

Actually if you don't have the mushroom, it's fine.

You know, you don't have to put mushroom, absolutely.

Then I put all my seasoning in there, you know?

Cayenne strong and of course, a bit of salt.

And you can even put a little bit of pepper.

Remember I have cayenne, but I mean the cayenne actually and black pepper is different in taste, you know?

And you mix it, yeah?

(spoon clinking) Mix it well, and you know, it is very good to do your sausage mixture ahead.

I tell you, I do sausage and I season it and let them several day to macerate and develop taste.

Now, if you do that ahead, however, don't put the mushroom in it.

If you put the mushroom in it, they're going to bleed and run their water.

It's going to bleed through your sausage mixed.

But if you are going to use them within the next day, you can put your mushroom in it.

Now I have some of those leaves as you can see, which have been blanched.

So they are soft now, they are not quite cooked.

The rib in the center is a bit tough, you know, so I would not want to use this.

So cut the rib and this, actually, you could have used in our soup, you know?

Put it there, take a little patty like this on top of it.

See that looks great to the color, and one of the advantage here, I'm telling you to use a lean type of pork and you say, yes, but sometime the lean pork is drier and it's true.

One of the advantage here is that by wrapping it in a green thing like that with a lot of moisture around, you know, I fold it around then I keep it moist on the outside while it's cooking, you know?

Now you can bake that in the oven also for a while with a little bit of oil on top.

You can do it even in a skillet.

I like to do it on the grill, you know, for a change.

And of course sometime you don't have a grill at home so you do it in a skillet, it's all right.

So those are our sausage.

We serve a couple of sausage like that per person.

And while they are finishing cooking there, I wanna move to the dessert and show you the dessert that we are going to do today.

It's a very nice, easy dessert.

Again, a type of gratin, you know?

We do a lot of gratin.

It is a gratin of fig and pear, you know?

Fig are extremely high in iron and very good for you.

I have some fresh fig here, Mission fig and I have some dry fig.

So you can see the fresh and the dry fig are, of course, different.

This is much softer and all that.

We cook that sometime with a little bit of wine, but those dry fig are quite good.

And very simply, we put the dry fig in the bottom of a gratin dish, you know?

See the way you cut them.

Cut them in large piece like this, put them in and we do the pear on top.

For this, I like to peel the pear, hm?

In the bottom again.

And since the pear is round, you go round, you know, depending, always follow the shape of the fruit.

(knife scraping) This way and this way now.

Remember that I did the round part of the pear one way and the long part of the pear another way.

This is an Anjou pear and it's ripe and nice.

If you have other type of pear, more elongated, it does even a bigger difference.

Again, you know, the round part of the pear.

I do it the round way, around, like an apple, and now the long part of it, the neck, if you want, I do it this way.

As I say, again, it's even more important if you use the Bosc, one of those long, elongated type of pear, you know?

So we cut it in half and again in quarter.

Very easy and quite good, you know, because the pear themself will have a lot of fiber also.

And we put that now directly on top of it.

Clean up the center.

That take a couple of minute.

And you know those gratin, you can do them a little bit ahead.

After they are cooked it's nice for the juice to stay, you know, and develop more taste.

See, that cover the whole bottom.

Other the seasoning agent, on top of that I'm putting some orange juice here.

We are putting a bit of butter, just a little bit here and there, maybe a tablespoon also.

And a bit of apricot... (knife clinking) Apricot preserve.

You can choose another type of preserve, you know, so I have a nice color, different degree, and that will go now in the oven.

Clean up the side and I'm going to put that in the oven about 400 degree.

That's going to take like 45 minute.

You know it take quite a while.

And you wanna cook it slowly and you can also occasionally take a look at it, because it may get dry, you know?

If it get dry, put a little bit of water in it or a little bit of orange juice or even lemon juice if you like it more acid, you know?

Now I'm going to clean up the place.

You can see that with the amount of sausage meat that I add you do quite a lot of sausage.

The dry fig, the fresh fig like this, those are Mission fig, which are dark and you have also the green one, two different type.

Both of them are terrific, you know?

What I wanna do now is to season the lentil, which have been cooking and as you can see those lentil don't really have any water left in them, you know?

They absorb all of the water that I add and that's really what you want.

Now they have to be seasoned.

Remember we put water in it, a bit of garlic, a bit of onion, and a couple of thyme, a couple of bay leaves.

So there is basically no seasoning and I want to season them with mustard that I have here.

I have some chopped cilantro here, which is the coriander, which is that strong type of parsley.

Some people call Japanese parsley, you know?

I love it, but I mean, if you object to the taste of this, then put regular parsley.

Then garlic.

I'll crush the garlic here, chop it... (knife thumping) Very fine here.

(knife thumping) I could add even a bit more garlic than that, but remember that the garlic uncooked that I have here is going to be much, much stronger than the cooked garlic.

Sometime, you know, I take a whole head of garlic and throw it around a roast and around that whole roast, you know you have maybe 15, 20 cloves of garlic and because I didn't peel them or did anything with them, they are going to be very, very mild.

On the other hand, if you chop the garlic this way, then it get very strong.

By crushing it you release some essential oil and it get very, very strong.

In addition to that, if you cook that garlic here and if you burn it, the whole taste will get kind of a strong and acrid, so you have to be careful.

The strongest ways to have your raw garlic, a raw paste of garlic like that is the strongest, you know, in term of taste.

Now I put some french mustard in it, I put my coriander.

Hm, smells good.

And I will put a bit of Tabasco with that and a little bit of olive oil, so I put the olive oil directly in there, stir it, and okay.

(bowl rattling) I like the Tabasco, you know?

You should taste it, of course.

Some people object to Tabasco.

I like it, some people like it very, very hot.

It's good.

And now of course my lentil in there.

You see those lentil cook very fast, 20, 25 minute.

You know, it depends how much they are dry also.

And also remember I didn't lose anything here because I just put enough water so that by the time they finish cooking I don't have to drain it, I don't have to throw out the cooking liquid.

And that's how you retain all of the nutrient, you know, in it, you retain all of the fiber, all of the nutrient, all of the vitamin if you don't throw that water out.

And that's what happened with soup, you know.

People say, well, if you cook the vegetable, you lose the vitamin.

Not really, if you leave the whole thing together.

So, you know, we leave that right in the middle and I'm going to get the cabbage and put them on top here.

As you can see they are brown, nicely brown, right through the, right through the cabbage itself and you can serve that lukewarm the way it is now.

In my opinion, this is the way I like it the best.

Now let's get out dessert in the oven and enjoy our budget meal.

I have the beautiful gratin here and I wanna bring that and serve it directly at the table.

I like to serve at the table occasionally.

And we get that a couple of piece of pear per person, the fig.

Don't forget to put some of the juice here, which is terrific.

Remember, the juice of the fig mixed with the orange juice.

You want to splurge a little bit.

We are putting maybe right in the middle a little bit of sour cream.

Yogurt, if you want less than sour cream.

The whole menu is there now that we have on our budget food.

And I'd like to tell you how much taste that you have in there, how much color and especially on extremely low fat.

And I use sour cream.

If you omit the sour cream, that menu is under 900 calorie with an enormous amount of fiber coming, particularly from the lentil.

We have lentil here.

Of course, with the cabbage and the sausage.

We have in the soup that all area of different vegetable.

Again, a great amount of fiber and color and taste.

We have the salad.

We always serve a salad with the menu.

And finally the gratin of pear and fig, which again, the fig, remember, are very, very high in fiber.

I hope you have enjoy it.

Even with this, I always like to enjoy a taste of wine and you know, you have some terrific jug wine around that you can have.

I'm sure you're going to enjoy it and I'm hope that you're going to make that menu for your friend and enjoy it as I have enjoy making it for you.

Happy cooking.