- Hi, I'm Jacques Pépin.

I know a lot of people think that cooking shows on television take too many shortcuts.

They show you things in half an hour that sometimes take days to do.

But today, I'm going to prove to you that you can put a great meal together from start to finish in less than 25 minutes.

Our beat-the-clock menu starts off with spicy shrimp on the bed of sauteed spinach.

Next, comes savory grilled lamb chops, served with charred bulgur wheat.

There is even time to make a refreshing dessert, fresh pineapple soaked in Black Currant Liqueur.

So, start your timers.

It's healthy fast food on "Today's Gourmet".

(bright music) (upbeat music) Everyone is in a hurry today.

Everyone say, "I can't cook, I don't have time to cook."

What?

You don't need that much time to cook well.

And to cook well, all you need is organization, more than time.

We don't have much time today.

I'm going to put the timer actually on 22-minute time of our show.

And by then, the meal will be finished.

That is, I hope so.

So, we put this here and we're going to start with a grand dish.

It's a nice menu that we are doing, a grand dish.

This is bulgur, which is a type of, it's a wheat, a cracked wheat which has been steamed and pressed.

And we're going to season that with onion and with scallion, with a little bit of curry and those tiny black resins that we call currant.

And we start then with this first, because this is the longest of our meal.

And we'll start with the onion.

It's always interesting to cook with those little black resins here.

And I say they are called currant.

And they are called currant, because in Europe, those come from a town called Corinth, C-O-R-I-N-T-H.

And someone must have misspelled it currant, C-U-R-R-A-N-T.

And that's why they are called, but they are actually resins, tiny resin.

You see, the currant doesn't dry well, it's full of seed inside.

So, I have this on high, a little bit of olive oil in there.

(utensils rattling) And with this, the onion first, the onion is going to saute for like a minute or so in there.

(sizzling) And with this, we put the curry.

The curry powder here, it's actually a mixture of different spice, turmeric, coriander, black pepper and so forth.

It is not really a plant, although there is a plant called curry, which is part of this, but it is not really that yellow part that we have here.

So, scallion on top of it, give me a little bit of color in this.

We add the scallion.

You see very often, when you cook fast, the hardest part is to get your pot hot.

I do soup very fast like that at home.

And really, the longest part of the soup, is to boil the water.

People do often at home, cooked spaghetti.

When I cook spaghetti, starting from scratch, I can have an egg and a cup of flour in the food processor.

And then, I do fresh pasta.

But the first thing that I do before that, I put a big pot of water on the stove.

Because by the time the water has boiled, the pasta is finished and it's boiling.

I put it and it's cooked in a couple of minutes.

Look at the beautiful color that I have here and that mixture of resin, I mean little currant and all this.

So, we put the bulgur wheat in there.

(utensils rattling) This is what you do, the tabbouleh salad with it, some salt, cracked pepper, black pepper of course is the best.

And I have two cup of chicken stock here, which is twice the amount of the liquid.

You wanna bring that to a boil and add it boil.

I'm going to lower the heat and cover it and cook it for about 15, 20 minutes should be cooked.

I'm not going to do the dishes in between.

But maybe, I will have time to do the dishes.

The second thing that I'm going to do, is the dessert actually.

So, let's see that.

Be sure that it come to a nice boil.

And for the dessert, we are doing a very simple pineapple dessert.

And I have that pineapple right here, okay.

Now, if this boiling, you have to wait until you're sure that it's to a strong boil.

Then, I can cover it and lower the heat to medium-low.

Now, there is many people, who tell you how to choose a pineapple.

If it's green, it's not ripe.

Apparently, it doesn't mean anything.

More important is the smell underneath.

I've been told also that when you pull the top leaf like that, if it comes out very easily, it is ripe.

Some other people have told me this is not true.

So, a lot of it is luck, but mostly it's smell.

You know what I say?

If it smells good underneath, that's the one that I choose.

So, we cut that in half.

You could use a couple of those actually for decoration.

That's not a bad idea.

And this, I want to cut in half.

(Jacques Pépin slicing) This way here, yeah, this one is nice and ripe, I can see that.

So, here, we are cooking for four people.

I think off of one is quite heavy, will probably be enough.

And we're going to do a sauce again with a mixture here of different ingredient that I have here.

And I have, again, those tiny currant that I put in there.

Some Cognac, about two tablespoon of Cognac.

Other sweetening agent, we have a bit of Crème de cassis, which is a Black Currant Liqueur-like and a bit of brown sugar.

So, that will be the base of the maceration for the pineapple.

I think I put all of this in there, fine.

So, the way I cut this, I will cut it into wedge here.

About a couple of wedge per person, I don't know whether I'll do more.

Then, I'll cut the top part of it, which is the woody part.

And the part underneath, I cut it directly on top of the skin.

Then, you can cut it into pieces like this and just add it to your sauce.

Especially here, I have another board, which is clean.

But if I do it on the table where I chopped garlic or something, I'm careful to keep that directly on the skin as I say, so that it doesn't pick up taste on the table.

What's very good with pineapple, it's very, very high in vitamin C, which is good.

And it's also terrific to do sherbet, like make beautiful sherbet.

All you have to do, it's a puree of this with a bit of citrus fruit and freeze it and it makes a great sherbet.

So, here we are.

I think that if I put another wedge here, which will half of my pineapple and I think it's really kind of enough for four people.

You could serve that with a bit of sour cream or yogurt if you want, or nothing at all really.

Here, it's good.

I saute it here to flavor it.

That's it.

And I'll leave it to macerate in there, maybe with those around here to remind you that it is pineapple, to remind me it is pineapple.

Okay, so, we finish with this.

This is really boiling hard, I may lower that a little bit.

And now, we move to the main course, which is grilled lamb chop.

And I bought those lamb chop about six ounce a piece.

And we're going to flavor them with salt, pepper and with herb here.

I have savory, which is in the family of the thyme.

This is fresh savory.

You can use fresh thyme or other type of herb or spice as well as dry ones sometime.

We're going to use in fact a lot of different dry herb for the first course.

Again, here, I would want to remove most of the fat, or the grill.

This is one lamb chop per person and if you divide it properly, six ounces, it should be enough, one per person.

We tend to have much smaller portion of meat now than we used to.

That is in the US basically.

In Europe, I remember when I was a child, if we had one pork chop or one lamb chop, it was always one.

It was never two or three.

And the steak were very small also.

So, this is pretty clean.

I'm putting a bit of salt and pepper on top of it.

And this, actually, you can do that ahead and let it macerate again also with a bit of oil on top, which is not what I'm going to do.

Because I'm going to start it cooking right away.

But you could do that.

So, here, I have a little bit of oil, like two teaspoon, should be enough, some of that mixture on top.

Then, I put it here on the other side.

I love grilled lamb.

It has a special flavor as you can see that lamb here, the nice pink color which indicate quality domestic lamb, so-called domestic lamb.

We love that nice pink color.

And the fat itself with a pure white like this.

And those are mild, milder than the New Zealand, or Australian lamb, which tend to be strong, because of the climatic condition more than anything else.

So, I put that to grill in the middle.

I can keep that on this side here.

And now, we are going to start the first dish, which is shrimp on green, like this that we'll use a bit later.

And I have here a mixture of different seasoning.

I have dry tarragon, I have thyme here, I have cayenne, I have oregano, coriander.

So, it's a mixture of very spicy thing that we are going to put together.

The shrimp here, if you want to peel your shrimp sometime, I do that with the shell on.

You just go around and leave the tail like this.

It looks nice with the tail.

You can leave the tail or remove it.

Actually with the tail sometime, I fold it, put it like this and I do little rabbit with that like this that I cook.

Okay, you just put a skewer through it, a tooth pick.

So, they hold and you have a rabbit.

So, the shrimp, again, those are relatively small shrimp.

You buy the shrimp per pound that is so many to the pound and those are about 30, 40 to the pound.

So, you serve four, five of those per person.

I have a mixture here of all of those different herb that I'm putting on top, pressing into it and into this also, I'm putting a little bit of olive oil and that could be done ahead and you could let it macerate.

But then, underneath, we're going to do spinach and I have spinach here.

I washed the spinach ahead.

So, you can also buy now a package of spinach all washed, so it's all right.

And in the spinach, I could even put a little bit of onion in there or plain.

I think that with this on top, I leave it plain and you put your spinach just clean from washing.

They're still wet in there and there is enough moisture in it.

So, it'll melt.

I mean the spinach, I mean the amount of spinach we have for four here will give you enough vitamin A for your daily requirements.

So, it's very high in vitamin A, like all the green leafy vegetable.

Now, I wanna look at the lamb chop, nicely brown on each side here, put them on the other side.

This is cooking nicely too.

So, we continue with the spinach.

Sometime, I season those spinach with garlic, goes well with it, of course.

There it is, dash of salt.

And that will become, we're going to arrange that right in the bottom of that tray and put the shrimp on top of it.

(sizzling) So, we are going to arrange them in this (sizzling) and the spinach are about cooked enough here.

(sizzling) I put back my skillet on top of the stove.

Let it get real hot, because I'm going to saute the shrimp in it.

Meanwhile, where this could brown a bit more, move it from another part on the grill then to be hotter.

Yeah, when this is real hot, then I will saute those shrimp in it.

I think, I didn't put salt on top of this, dash of salt.

Shrimp are available year round now and it's one of the best shellfish, provided you don't overcook it.

This will cook like a minute on each side at the most.

(sizzling) As soon as they turn red, (indistinct) on each side they are cooked.

So, give them a little bit on each side, a bit of the juice on top here.

(sizzling) And now, I can spread this out to have a nice bed of spinach.

I think the clock is ticking.

(sizzling) I think we have a little while yet to go.

So, (sizzling) there it is.

I can smell the shrimp how they cook there, saute them on the other side.

See the beautiful red color that they have?

And if you do a lot of shrimp, if you do a great quantity when I do a party, then I cook them even less.

Because by the time you pile them together, you pile them together, they continue, they have a lot of heat left in them.

They continue cooking for a while.

Okay, I could, now, I would brown this enough.

What I like to do with the lamb chop, is to put it in a warm oven now and keep it warm until ready to serve.

And this is very important.

Because what happen when you cook something on very high heat?

The meat kind of contract and the juice goes throughout the center of the meat.

And if you take like a roast beef out of the oven and cut through it, all of the outside look overdone.

Because it's squeezed out of juice, so it's gray and all the center is kind of flabby and very wet.

If you let that piece of meat rest, the meat decontract and the juice, the myoglobin, which is the muscle tissue, run through the meat and the whole thing is pink from beginning to end.

Okay, now, shrimp are cooked.

And we can arrange them on top here.

(sizzling) I could pour them directly actually.

Very often at home, I will serve in individual plate of course rather than I think, it's gonna be easier to do it this way and arrange it after.

Very good and they smell good.

So, our dish is finished here.

It can go to the dining room.

We have the dessert finished and while the bulgur, which is close to finish, also is finishing, I'm going to do a salad and a tomato salad.

I have beautiful torpedo red onion here and real ripe tomato, which is the way the tomato should be to make a tomato salad.

So, use your thumb as the pivots to cut this out.

Sometime, I remove the seed.

But when the tomato is nice and juicy like this, it's fine the way it is.

We cut it across in nice slice.

I know that my knife is sharp.

'Cause when a knife cut right through ripe tomato like this, it indicate sharpness.

So, we'll arrange that around.

Here we are.

I feel that I have more time even than I need.

But what I could do actually with the top of that tomato is to do a flower with the skin here that I've done with the skin of the tomato.

That's one way of peeling your tomato.

I do two strip to decorate the center, this.

Then, I can continue slicing my tomato to finish filling up the plate here.

Put a couple in the center.

And now, we do the rose with this, going to show nicely.

And a tight scroll with this to put in the center, up, here we are.

To make it come out a bit better, maybe I put a bit of parsley here, flat parsley in the center, so that you can see the red of the tomato right here.

You can put that on top.

Should be a bit more out.

And maybe a bit of onion with that.

Those red torpedo onion are beautiful, light and tender.

And I like the red onion with tomato.

So, let's slice that very thin.

(Jacques Pépin slicing) And we can have those little onion ring here, all around that we can arrange on top of our tomato.

Hmm, that look good.

So, that's plenty onion.

All we need on top of that is a bit of salt, cracked pepper, a lot of cracked pepper, freshly ground pepper, a little bit of vinegar, red wine vinegar preferably as I have here, or a Balsamic Vinegar is good, is actually what I have here.

And olive oil again on top.

Terrific.

And now, that's about it.

Fine, I could put a bit more parsley or basil around if I have it here.

I like the green on top and the taste of it, the whole mixture.

So, our salad is ready.

I think my timer went off.

The timer was wrong.

Anyway, I still have a couple of minutes to go.

Now, we're ready anyway to serve the main course.

And I will serve that directly on top of this.

Here, I have some extra savory on top.

Let me get the bulgur here, which, as you can see, is nice and fluffy.

Cooked beautiful.

That's a wonderful smell, the smell of the curry coming out of it.

And that, as you can see, a cup of bulgur is going to do quite a lot.

We are going to spread it out a little bit, so that we can sit our lamb chop right on top of it and the juice of the lamb chop can go into it.

So, all we have to go is to get lamb chop, (Jacques Pépin closes oven door) place it right on top of it.

There is a natural juice coming out of it.

And here it is!

A whole meal in less time than it takes you to open a can of soup and warm it up, nice and fresh.

Now, it's time to enjoy it and you should spend more time enjoying it than cooking it.

Took me 22 minutes about to cook it and I left myself three minute more to open wine, cut bread and so forth.

So, I have a bottle of wine here, a bottle of Pinot noir.

And as you can see, the top of the bottle, you want to take enough of the metal, cut it, enough of the metal.

So, when you pour the wine, the wine doesn't touch the metal.

But it's not proper to remove the whole thing.

This is a special type of bottle up in there, cork up in there.

You slide one on one side and the other one on the other side and you can move it up and down like that to go inside, then twist it or you go up.

This is good for all corks, so that they don't crumble.

Sometime, with a regular cork screw crumbled in it and you don't want this.

But we put ourself a little bit of wine to toast you.

We have a nice large bread here that will go well with our meal.

A slice of bread, here it is.

And if we wanna recap the meal, we start with the shrimp.

Remember, macerated with all those very spicy seasoning, cayenne and coriander and so forth, saute on the green, the spinach.

Saute lightly in oil, placed right on top of it, that dish would take a couple of minutes to do.

This dish could be a main course as well as that one.

The whole meal here is about 725 calorie, which is not much.

Really, we have that bulgur, which is nice and spicy with the curry in it.

Those four large lamb chop, you have for the lamb chop that is after the rib.

There is no rib there.

And those are grilled, remember about four, five minutes on each side and finished slowly into the oven.

And we have a delicious salad here, the tomato salad with those torpedo onion and that's spicy and very colorful.

And finally, our pineapple, beautiful pineapple marinaded with a little bit of Cognac in it.

We have Crème de cassis, we have the currant and so forth.

And I enjoyed making that meal for you.

I'm sure you can rush home and make a meal in 20 minutes as I did.

Your friend will be, or your family will be very happy with him, I'm sure.

Thank you for looking at the meal and happy cooking.