- Hi, I'm Jacques Pépin.

You know, there are some dishes that I just never get tired of making, and that's partly because they are casual and simple, the way I like to eat and live.

Here are the kind of informal healthy meals I like: a plate of pasta with lots of fresh vegetables, leg of lamb that's been marinated in fresh mint and grilled over a flame, and a terrific and simple dessert, bread and cherry pudding served warm with almond and yogurt.

That's what I'll make for you today with a little help from my friend the butcher Merle Ellis, so join me on "Today's Gourmet."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) I am cooking great recipe for you today.

I'm cooking thing that I like to eat a lot, pasta with a lot of vegetables.

When we don't know what to eat at home, we eat pasta most of the time and most of the time with vegetable sauce and lamb.

I love to have lamb on the grill.

I have here a pound, piece of lamb, which is really the back leg of the lamb and it has been trimmed on this side.

This is often the way you get it in the supermarket and that's why I brought it to show you the whole piece, when, in fact, I don't really need all of it.

I'm taking out here what we call the shank bone, you know?

And with this I will just take a piece of this to grill.

The bone here you can keep it to make soup with it.

And you cut along the bone here, you can see the bone, and around and that large muscle that I'm carrying here is the top round, so called, which is the largest muscle of the back leg.

You know, I'm sure the butcher can do that for you.

Just wanna show you a little bit what you do with lamb, and I could bone it out a bit closer than this, but often I even cut it right there because this is the shank, and that shank here, you braise it separate, you know?

But that piece of meat here, you can buy this way.

What I want out of that is that large muscle that we call the top round here.

And this, I want to remove most of the fat of it.

Look at the color of that lamb.

It's nice and pink, you know, and this is what you want, what we call a domestic lamb, as opposed to New Zealand or Australian lamb, which because of climatic condition tend to be a bit stronger in taste.

They are still fine, you know, and a bit less expensive.

You will also know that if you really remove the fat that I'm doing, the strong taste is almost all the time in the fat, you know?

And by the time you remove the fat a lot, even an Australian or other type of lamb is going to be quite good.

I will open this a little bit to spread it out, you know, because what you want to have is one layer.

If you see any pieces of fat, just remove it.

And this, we want to put that into a marinade, you know, that is a mixture of different seasoning that we are going to use to flavor the meat.

And what we have here is very simply apricot jam.

I have some mint, I have a jalapeno pepper, I have some garlic, some ginger, a bit of water.

We're going to put all of that together into that miracle little machine here and ground it in there.

So here I have, I put directly the clove of garlic, like two, three clove of garlic, maybe pieces of ginger.

You know, I love the taste of ginger.

Just cut it into pieces in there, you know?

You see you can do that in that thing.

It won't work as well in the food processor.

It doesn't turn fast enough.

And mint, you know, the Arab are going to do a lot of lamb with mint.

The whole Arabic world, you know, cook a lot of lamb and various, often they use flavored with mint.

It kind of a cool effect on it.

It works quite well, you know, it's a bit different.

Add a bit of sweetener.

You can put a bit of honey.

In that case, I put a little bit of apricot preserve, a dash of water in there, and a little bit of soy instead of the salt, you know, to give me what I need in there and that we emulsify together.

If I get it right, right in the center.

(Cuisinart buzzes) I could also put peppercorn in it, but look at that, it liquifies in second, you know?

That's that wonderful fragrance and especially with the mint.

And that's all I want to do with this to dip my meat into this, and it's nice to let it macerate in it.

You know what you can do also, which I do occasionally at home, I put the piece of meat directly in a plastic bag and the marinade in the plastic bag and I close it, lock it, and I can keep it like that for six, seven hours.

Overnight is perfectly fine, you know?

What we are going to do is that we are going to start cooking it right away.

So I will put it directly on the grill here.

I have my grill working here and that I will keep this, because later on I will put back the meat into it and finish it in the oven.

So I put it here.

And while this start cooking, we are going to start the first course, which is the pasta, with a sauce, a vegetable sauce, a bit of olive oil here.

And we're going to cook the pasta also.

So I don't need this anymore.

I put it right here.

And this is what we have for our pasta today.

First the eggplant.

I have a beautiful eggplant here.

We're going to cut some of it, about half of this, you know, into little dice.

Always I use the skin of the eggplant also, you know?

You do a pasta sauce like this with vegetable, of course it extend your pasta and it's better for you, 'cause you don't have to put that much oil or other things in it.

I have a red onion that I'm sauteing also with the pasta.

I love onion, red onion, other very definite taste.

I like it with tomato salad also, you know?

Then I put this in there and this has to cook for a few minutes, you know?

This has to cook for about 5, 6, 7 minutes, and while this is cooking, I am going to start my pasta.

I have some water boiling here.

I have no salt or anything on the water.

I know that most people will tell you to put salt in the water for pasta.

I have done it one way and the other with and without, and I don't really think that it make any difference, so I don't put any salt in the water.

The salt comes after when I put the seasoning, cheese, and so forth.

This is a very hard durum type of pasta, which is a very good quality.

And there is certain number to those spaghetti, you know, and the thinner they are, of course, the less time they take to cook, but I would say that this is going to take about seven, eight minute to cook into that boiling water.

I have a lot of water here.

We'll saute this again a little bit, continue cooking it, and maybe while this is cooking, let's look at the lamb on the other side.

As you can see, I have a beautiful color already, the marking of the grill and the type of taste that I want to have with that grilling process.

So talking about lamb, you know, there is a lot of controversy about meat.

I mean, people say, shall I eat beef or not beef, or with the fat or are they grown with hormone?

I have an expert today, my dear friend here, Merle Ellis, who is known as the butcher.

He has a syndicated column all over the country, and there is no one in the United States who knows meat as well as he does.

- Yeah, - So what did you bring for us?

- Yeah, there is.

- Yeah.

- Jacques, it smells wonderful.

It smells good.

- It smells good.

That grilled lamb is really something else.

- Do you have a lamb here?

- Yeah, I brought a little bit of everything and you just, you know, so you tell me what your audience might like to know.

Here's a whole leg of lamb, I thought I'd bring the one and show, because here we get lamb in a variety.

I think butchers don't like lamb a lot sometimes because we get it in a variety of different forms - Yes.

- and it's not always as the way it should be.

What you boned out was the French or the three quarter.

- [Jacques] Yes.

- There's a hip bone in here that is, unless you really know how to cut lamb, which Jacque does, it's difficult to get out.

So I recommend the three quarter leg, where they take the sirloin off, because there's a big bunch of bone in here and get the three quarter leg.

Now, the trotter here is always taken off and sometimes, unfortunately, they crack the bone clear up here and bend it around, so if you want to roast a nice classic French leg, you can't do it because they've cracked the bone.

- But the one I had there was good.

- That was good, yeah.

- Yeah, yes.

- So anyway, look for a three quarter leg, which is the one that Jacques was using earlier and bone it out.

There's all kinds of, and lamb is a very nutritious meat because I mean it doesn't get a lot of, you know, hormones.

I think it grows up in the mountains, where I first met you, as a matter of fact, 13,000 feet up in the Colorado Rockies.

Okay, pork.

- This is pork and pork always people think it's too fat.

It has changed, I mean.

- Pork has changed a lot over the years.

We used to raise pork in this country almost as much for the fat because we used it, the lard for baking and all that sort of things.

The pork industry is really producing some excellent, excellent quality pork, and it's very, very much leaner.

You can do all kinds of things.

Their campaign now is the other white meat because you can use pork really in dishes that you would normally use veal or chicken or, because it's a very, very, very tender meat.

- I'm curious to see that veal here because I mean you have.

- Okay, veal is basically the byproduct of the dairy industry as you know, and this is, you know, when a cow has to be kept fresh, as they say to give milk, so if a calf is born and it's a female, a heifer calf, it's kept for replacement in the herd.

But if it's a male calf, poor thing, it's gonna end up veal.

This is the formula fed white 10, 12 weeks.

- [Jacques] Yes.

- And they are, that's $12.99 a pound I paid for that.

That's expensive, and a lot of people are concerned that they're not being well cared for.

Believe me, if you've got that much money in the pen, you're taking real good care of it.

- Yes, I agree with that.

- Let's talk a little bit about beef and what to look for.

- Probably the biggest controversy, you know, I mean is there anything that the industry is doing to regain the market, you know, to get more, I mean, people are afraid to eat a steak, - I know it.

- Too much fat, cholesterol.

- And so much of that is partly, you know, it's, we're getting a lot of, the meat industry's got a lot of bad press unfortunately.

- What about the hormones?

- Hormones, really, they're used, I'm not, but there's no difference between the natural hormone in the beef and the hormone that they use.

The only difference is though, the natural hormone in a steer is a male hormone and when they implant it in the ear it's a female hormone.

What it does is to create more lean meat and less fat.

- Yes, but what is the difference then between, though, this is the choice, right?

- This is choice, yeah, USDA choice.

- Okay.

- You can tell on the stamp here.

What you look for is, I look for choice.

Prime is almost impossible to find, but choice is pretty much available everywhere.

I think more people are disappointed, Jacques, and I know you agree with this, by the fact that beef is not properly aged.

- That's true.

- than for any other single reason.

This is aged and this is what, now a lot of butchers will tell you that they age their beef in the plastic package.

You can't age it in the plastic package.

- No, that's true.

- This has been dry.

- Air dry, air dry.

- And, you know, it looks a little messy on the outside, but if you cut into that, I don't know if we can show that, but once you cut into it, it looks beautiful on the inside.

And here's what you're gonna get when you get home is a nice piece of pink meat.

- [Jacques] Right.

- [Merle] Trim all that excess waste fat out and you've got a great piece of beef.

- So I mean there is no danger in eating beef, right?

- No, no, live a little, you know?

- Small portion, but there is.

- Well sure, we're not gonna eat - Take the fat out of it.

- a great big steak like that every day, but a little bit sure tastes good.

- Well that's terrific.

I'm glad you came and - Thank you.

- tell us a little bit about lamb.

I think that my.

- It's smelling good over there.

- Yeah, okay.

- Thanks Jacques.

- Merle, thank you for coming, yeah.

Let's see now where we are with our lamb and the sauce here.

I think the lamb is grilled beautifully now.

I'll see, you have the same grilling on the other side, again, and now I put that back in the marinade.

I could keep it longer, you know, on the grill, but what I want to do is really to finish it up in the oven before we have it.

And during that time I can finish, need a little bit more olive oil here, I want to finish the sauce for this.

My pasta is going to be cooked soon and for that sauce I need a bit of tomato and maybe some garlic.

I have two clove, two large clove of garlic here that I'm going to chop.

You don't wanna put the garlic too much ahead because it may burn.

So I'm putting it now with the fresh tomato and that I don't really want it to cook very much.

Just basically warm up, you know.

So I'm cutting that in there.

The garlic in the eggplant and the tomato.

Beautiful tomato here, I don't really need to take the seed or the juice, you know, out.

I like the taste of fresh uncooked tomato.

You know, very often you think that tomato sauce has to be cooked for hours and hours.

The tendency, you know, when the tomato sauce cook too long, you know it become black, become strong, it become bitter, and it kind of burn your stomach.

So I like fresh tomato like this that we cook at the last moment.

(food sizzles) Good.

Finish it cooking.

Let's check if the pasta is cooked now about seven, eight minutes.

It should be just about right.

You can have it what is called, the Italian call al dente, that is just biting a little bit to the teeth.

And actually, you know, when you break a pasta open, you can look inside the pasta.

If there is still a little bit of white inside, then it is often what they call al dente.

So what I want to do here is to drain this out.

Now, I will bring the sauce right in there, you know, I mean all my, and what I like to do is to put a little bit of the juice from the pasta here to moisten this, the pasta on top of it.

And I have quite a lot of vegetable as you can see here in my pasta.

And it is the time now to toss my pasta around with the vegetable, as you can see, it has a beautiful color, a bit of cheese on top of it if you want.

Bit of Parmesan reggiano, a bit of herb, and here it is our first course, the pasta and vegetable sauce.

(soft music) And with the pasta and lamb, today we're doing a cauliflower as a vegetable.

A light tight head of cauliflowers that I have here.

We have fresh bread crumbs, we have some scallion, and what we are going to do is to start salting the bread crumb and the scallion to put it on top of the cauliflowers.

I'm gonna start that first.

I have like two tablespoon of safflower oil here into which I'm going to fry the bread.

And that, as I say, is going to go on top, and we can also put the scallion in it.

That makes a nice kind of a combination on top of the cauliflower.

I have here to saute quite fast just so that the bread get nice and brown, you know?

And with the cauliflowers, you can see have a very, very tight head, and that's what you want to look for.

You don't want something yellowish and open like the flower.

This is tight.

We remove those leaves from the outside, and actually, you know, when I do soup, I put this into the soup so I don't really lose anything.

Removing a little bit of, again, the core here.

And sometime I cook the whole cauliflower this way, I steam it, and it's a nice way to do it.

Cauliflower is very low in calorie, nice fiber, and it has about 35% per cup of calorie.

Of course, it will increase a little bit with the olive oil that we put or the oil that we put on top of it.

We divide that into what is called floret, you know, and sometimes certain time of the winter when it's old, I will notice in the flower that the edge of it like this add a skin, which is very tough, so I removed that, but this is not the case for us.

The way we cook this very simply, again, I have one cooking here.

You can see that there is basically no more liquid left in it.

Just put a little bit of liquid in the bottom of my stainless steel pan, and by the time it's finished cooking, then there is no more liquid left.

And that's what I want so that I keep all of the nutrient in it.

So we want to arrange it directly in there.

I have, as I said, basically no more water into this, maybe a little bit I put in there, and the hot cauliflowers we'll put directly there.

I can sprinkle a little bit of pepper on top of this, a dash of salt in it to finish it up, and this will be sprinkled on top of the cauliflowers.

A very nice dish that we use this as an accompaniment for the lamb, but very often I use that at the first course and it just as well.

So with the vegetable now, we are going to do the dessert.

I'll leave that here.

And the dessert is made of cherry.

I have bread, I have some milk, I have cherry, I have cherry preserve, almond, and sugar.

So the first thing that we do, I have three slices of bread here.

It's a type of pudding, you know, very simple that I'm going to put two, three slice of bread more than enough for this.

Just break the bread, which has been toasted, you know, it give it a better taste.

You could also put it in the food processor, but you know, it is fine to do it this way.

Just break it into pieces and we soak it with the milk, you know?

That make a mixture that often we call in French a panade, you know, p-a-n-a-d-e, and the panade refer to a type of mixture that you thicken with.

A panade doesn't have to be milk and bread, sometimes it's other things, other thickening agent.

So this we'll let it soak a little bit for the bread to absorb the milk, and during that time, I wanna show you how to pit the cherries, you know?

I have those nice, large bing cherries here, and to remove the pit, you can buy one of those little machine where you put it in it, used for olives also.

Just go right through and that will remove that pit right here.

Whoop, don't lose it in there.

Actually, if you don't have one, it's perfectly fine, you can use a bobby pin, you know, with the hole, and that comes out very easy with it.

Actually what I do most of the time I use a knife.

If with a knife I press with my hand to soften the cherry in that hole, I can go with the point of the knife and scoop out the pit.

You see it goes (indistinct).

Just loosen the pit in the middle by pressing a little bit and that's it.

So it goes very easily this way, you see, just as well.

Don't put it on your board like I'm doing, because it will stain it, and after you have to clean it up with soap, maybe even a bit of Clorox to take this out.

So this now is getting soft, the bread, you can crush it with a fork or maybe even crush it with your finger.

If you wanna go faster with this, that's good.

And what I want to do in it is to mix the cherry preserve right there, about half of those almond, a little bit of sugar, and the rest of the sugar, I will mix it with those almond and the cherry.

So it's like kind of a nice earthy dish, you know, beautiful, especially when the cherry are good.

Try to go to a farm.

I go to a farm where I live and try to get fresh fruit directly from the farm there, and I know it's a good organic farm so I get good quality fruit.

You spread that out in your gratin dish this way and your almond and sugar on top of it.

And that will have to go into the oven for about 35 minute, about 350 degree oven, so that's good.

And of course I have one here which has been cooking because you don't want to serve that too hot.

Now you can serve it this way, and to make it a bit nicer, what we do is to put a little bit of powder sugar on top.

You want it maybe lukewarm, maybe with a slice of pound cake or by itself.

It's terrific as the dessert.

And now it's time to slice our meat.

It's been resting in the oven, on a low oven to continue cooking in its own, in its own heat, you know?

And this is what you want to do to get a piece of meat, like this one is going to be approximately medium rare.

Of course, you can have it more cook or less cook.

It's purely a question of how you like your meat.

I mean this one will be pink and that's how I like my lamb.

I know that, for example, my mother would like it more cooked.

Now, it's important for that meat to rest for a while because if the meat rest, then it will develop that color, that red color all over that you want because it will have time for the juice to get through the meat all over.

I mean you can have that extra sauce and bring it directly to the table, also.

It's very pungent and nice.

So remember that when you do a roast, that roast should rest for a while before you give it in a hot oven.

You could actually cook it on the grill completely, but it is a really a better technique to do it first on the grill, and to leave it a little bit to warm up in your oven now.

So we have quite a dinner for you tonight.

We have the pasta, I mean the fresh pasta here with all the vegetable sauce and all that.

You have a lot of fiber, you know, in those pasta and so forth.

It's good.

I love those cauliflowers done this way with a breadcrumb, which is kind of crunchy on top.

And the scallion, I mean I could even put a dash of garlic in it.

That would be good too.

And of course the roast.

And as you can see, this is a roast calculated for four people, and it's more than enough if you cut it in two slice.

It could even serve six people, and at that point your menu would go down much lower than 1,000 calories per person.

And finally, we have a salad and our dessert here.

This is the gratin of fresh cherries here, which of course is just right taking together.

I like it just lukewarm, and again, this is for four people, which is quite a lot.

You can put a little bit if you want a sour cream next to it.

If you want to cut down, maybe a bit of yogurt, it's very good with the yogurt too.

And that really make a very good rich dessert.

And with that, I think we're going to have a glass of merlot here.

The merlot, of course, is a wine.

This one is from the Sonoma county in California.

We do a merlot in the southwest of France in Bordeaux, which is just as great and this one is very good too.

I hope you enjoy our meal today.

I enjoy making it for you.

Bon Appetit.