- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

I've at the New England shore, my home for years, and one thing that I've learned to love is the summertime supper.

It's a wonderful tradition and I'll cook my own version for you today.

First, a creamy spinach and chicken veloute.

Then a succulent lobster, of course, but I'll make it on a bed of couscous with chive sauce and a refreshing crab souffle with grapefruit.

It's a new twist on New England, coming up on "Today's Gourmet".

(uptempo music) You know, when summer come, I live in New England on the coastline, I love to do those menu outside and the food that we have in New England.

Of course, lobster is a big thing in New England in summer, and we do a lot of lobster, corn and so forth.

But often we do that, we use a lot of grain in my cooking and often we do that with a simple soup at night if it's a bit fresh.

And that's what I'm going to start with today.

I'm going to show you how to make a little veloute of spinach.

A veloute is a type of smooth type of soup.

What I have here is four cup of chicken stock, and this is homemade chicken stock, so it's very defated.

It's very nice and clear.

There is no salt in it.

I can control the salt, of course, much better if I do my own.

Another thickening agent here, we are going to use a cream of wheat.

And cream of wheat, of course, is a grain, you know, it is available all over and it will thicken very fast.

So just pour that directly into your boiling stock.

Remember that you could put tapioca.

You could put semolina.

You could put a lot of other thing.

This will cook quite fast.

So I put that on low, cover it, and that will cook in a couple of minutes.

While this is cooking, I want to discuss lobster with you.

Look at those beautiful lobster.

Those are about two pound a piece.

And those two-pound-a-piece lobster that we have here for the menu that we do, I like very often to take the female lobster.

The reason is that the female lobster has beautiful, the roe inside which turn bright red, which we are going to mix with couscous in it.

And I wanted to show you the difference between the female lobster and the male lobster.

For example, this one is a female lobster.

If you see the last two little appendage here that indicate the female and the spectrum, I mean, the body itself is slightly wider.

This is a male lobster and you can see that the two last appendage are kind of bony and they go right up the rib cage, which is narrower actually.

So you can see really when you buy lobster, you can ask the fishmonger, but you can really see the difference.

And it does make a difference even sometime in taste.

I mean, it is said that the female lobster is more tender.

It may be true too.

There is two difference between those claws.

You can see this one is larger with thick claw.

This is really your crusher.

He crush with it.

It went longer with this.

This is the pincher, so it's a little bit different.

Now, we're going to cook those lobster.

To cook them, we're going to boil them.

And I have boiling water right here.

We put them directly into the boiling water.

I know that some people are a bit skirmish about putting the lobster in boiling water, but this is really the fastest way to kill the lobster.

If you want to call the fishmonger and have a killed lobster, you can buy it this way.

However, of course, someone has to kill it, whether it's you or not.

And frankly, you don't want to eat a dead lobster.

It is like oyster.

It's like many clams and so forth.

I mean, whether it moves or not, but it is alive.

I mean, the oyster or the claim when you eat it.

Otherwise, you would not want to eat it.

So here I'm looking at my soup, which is doing very well.

As you can see, just a little bit of viscosity with this.

I'm gonna put a dash of salt in this.

Remember, I don't have any salt to that extent and probably a little bit of pepper and you could do your veloute like this, practically until the moment you serve it.

But I would wait until the last moment to put the grain.

In our recipe here, I am putting spinach in it and I have nice, tender spinach here.

Remember that all of those dark, leafy vegetable are very high in calcium, no, and in vitamin A also, as a matter of fact.

Look, when you get your spinach like that, this is fairly tender.

I can know with my finger.

So I will cut the end of it and use the leaf.

Sometime, in full winter when the stem is really tough then I open it this way.

Here what we are going to do, very simply, we cut it in like two or three pieces and we put those directly into the boiling liquid and that will kind of melt into it quite fast.

You know, it cook very fast.

So all we have to do is to stir it with this and that's why I say, it's much better to do it at the last moment.

Now, the soup as it is here is terrific and you could serve it just like this.

It's perfectly fine.

But I want to make it a bit richer than I put a bit of cream in it.

Special occasion, very often we have it this way and even when I put cream, I will put about four tablespoon, the value of one tablespoon of cream per person to make it richer.

Another I say, again, sometime with, sometime without.

And that's all there is to it.

You bring it to a boil then serve it directly.

You see I have four large portion really here, but this is a beautiful soup, summer or winter soup, which take only a few minute to do and I'm sure you will enjoy it.

We've put cream of wheat in our soup and today in the New England menu, we are going to use couscous.

And couscous is a special grain, I want to talk to you a little bit about grain.

And as you see, I have a whole array of what's available in the market.

There is an enormous amount of grain.

Unusual one like quinoa or millet.

Here, I have flour, regular flour, that wheat, this is unbleached.

The bleaching, of course, introduce some bleaching agent in the flour that you don't need.

So I usually buy unbleached flour.

This, for example, is actually a whole wheat berry, which is rolled very thin and I use that in bread very often.

This is the cream of wheat, the center of the berry that we can thicken soup as we've done today with it.

This is the bran, the outside of the berry that you can add to your flour to have a whole wheat bran, a whole wheat flour.

Here, I have the couscous here that we are using today and the couscous is also a wheat which is grounded, but see, thicker than the flour and thicker than that.

And the semolina is somewhere in between.

Here, we have bulgur wheat and bulgur is actually a wheat, also wheat berry, which is precooked, steamed and cracked.

So it is precooked because it has been steamed.

You just put water on it, it swell up and that's it, it's ready.

And, finally, we had an oat bran.

Oat bran is very good for cholesterol.

It's used a great deal.

You should really, as you decrease your portion of meat, increase your portion of grain.

The whole grain are complex carbohydrate type of food.

It has a lot of fiber in it.

It's a whole meal by itself.

So you should get into grain a little more.

And now, we are going to cook our couscous.

But first, before I cook the couscous, I'm going to clean up the lobster because I want to use the inside of the lobster in my couscous.

So this has been cooked.

I break that lobster now and you can see the dark green color here.

The dark green color is actually the roe of the female.

This is the part of it which is going to turn bright red when it cooked later.

So you break the tail this way.

Open your carcass this way and you can empty that inside in a little bowl here.

I'm gonna show that to you.

You can see that here, that dark green color is the roe of the female.

The light green one is actually what is called the tomalley, T-O-M-A-L-L-E-Y, which is the liver, and we use both.

This, as I say, will change color as it cooked.

Remember that this is not completely cooked because we have to recook it.

What we do, we crack the shell here and open it.

This is how you separate your tail.

This is the tail meat.

I keep the end pieces here for decoration, which I have in there.

The shell, you can reboil your shell, you know, and do a soup with it, which is often what I do at home.

This we're going to cut it in half.

You see, to put it there.

I have another one which is cooked here.

I want to put it there.

And the claw, you know.

The claw, when you break those claw, your best bet is to do it on top of a towel.

Otherwise, it splatter all over the place.

So you break it this way.

Crack that piece, crack the tail and pull it out.

As you can see, you have the whole tail this way.

Don't forget that piece.

Actually that particular mussel right here, you have a little round piece of meat.

It is like the oyster, you know, in the chicken and it is considered the choicest piece of meat in the whole lobster.

That piece right there, you know.

Then we have another piece here.

I'm not going to clean up the whole lobster.

There, but again as I say, reuse this and the juice even to make a soup with it, which is what I do.

Now, we are going to cook the couscous with this.

And, by the way, I forget to tell you, but the shell of the lobster itself, I have it here.

We break it in half because we're going to use that half to pile up our couscous in it.

So we need that.

In the meantime, this can be kept hot.

Put some of the reduced stock.

Remember, I cooked the lobster in water, just water, and that water doesn't have any salt or anything in it.

There is enough salt in the lobster.

We reduce all that water to four cup and I used it to reheat that meat as well as to do a sauce later on.

So now, for our couscous, we are putting a little bit of olive oil in there.

Onion, we're gonna saute some onion.

And the couscous cook very fast, you know.

It's a nice thing to cook.

And I want to put all of that in there and you will see that dark green roe from the lobster female.

You can see it turning red right now under your eye, you know.

That will not only flavor the onion and the couscous, see it is a beautiful red color now, not only the flavor.

So we put the couscous in there.

I have 10 ounces of couscous, which is about a cup and a half.

And now I say the red thing that we put there was the tomalley, which is the light green part.

And the deep green part is the roe.

Now, it's mixed together.

A dash of salt in this.

And I have the same amount of couscous and water, a cup and a half of boiling water, which I boil in the microwave oven.

You cover this and that's it.

You put it on the side.

It is cooked enough, within 10 minutes after, you can fluff it and it's cooked.

So what we are going to do is to serve the lobster on top of the couscous.

We also want to do a sauce with it.

And for the sauce, very simple.

I have half a cup of the lobster liquid again that I have reduced in there.

I will test it.

I think there is enough salt in it.

I can put a little bit of pepper, freshly ground pepper in there and chive.

We doing a chive sauce, so I have a lot of chive.

You can have, of course, another type of herbs because in my garden in summer, I love to use, for example, chervil.

Chervil is a very good herb to use at the last moment like this.

And we used to do those sauce, usually with butter.

I finish it with butter.

Now, we do it with oil, olive oil, and what I have in there, what I'm creating, it's an emulsion.

That is, I have about half a cup of the liquid from the lobster and maybe three tablespoon of oil.

The whole thing come to a strong boil and we blend together through that boiling process.

So that's a nice light, delicate sauce.

I can even put a little more of the lobster juice in it that I have here.

So we bring that to a strong boil and that you would want to do only at the end because it takes a few minutes.

If you have your stock ready, if you have your olive oil next to you, different type of herb, bring to a strong boil.

You may even put, I think it's good this way, maybe a little dash of salt, you may even put a bit of lemon juice if you want.

And now, we can practically finish our lobster.

I'm going to present it on that beautiful plate.

I have another couscous which has been done here and, as you can see, I can fluff it very nicely.

Trust the amount of water that I add that I say is enough.

My sauce is done here.

The lobster meat has been reheated in there.

See, you reheat it gently without boiling it, just warming up slightly in that stock.

So what we want to do here, we put that on top, or maybe first, we put a little bit of the couscous on the plate and, again, with the ball of a big spoon, spread it around.

You know, then put that in the center of it, pile it up with a bit more couscous this way.

Then you can put your half lobster meat that you can stay whole this way and your leg that you can cut in half, if you want.

And put a piece on each side here.

Now, the green chives mixture on top and around a little bit.

I have a beautiful dish here and if you want to make it even fancier or if you want to decorate a little more, you can do that for a salad.

Then you can use the two piece from the tail of the lobster, one of the claw here, one of the little leg rather.

What you do, you put the antenna at the end to imitate a (indistinct) here or large ancient animal.

You put a bit of Q-tips across this, this on each side, and you have that type of flying animal that you can put other decoration on top of it or you do that very often on a cold lobster salad.

You would want to do that for a decoration.

(uptempo music) I'm going to make a beautiful dessert for you today.

This is a citrus fruit souffle that we're going to put into crepe.

Really, a nice, delicate dessert that you may want to do when your friend and you are cooking in the kitchen.

For a big party, it's not the type of thing that you want to do ahead.

We have different segment to it.

First, I wanna show you how to make a grapefruit sauce and I have here a grapefruit and I try to buy the ruby red to have beautifully red inside the grapefruit.

Just grate it on all part of this, only the top part of the skin, again, where you have the essential oil.

Then bang it this way and you have your rind now.

This is where you have the essential oil, a lot of the taste in there.

And, eventually, what we want to do with this is to mix that with about four tablespoon of sugar.

That's going to go in the beaten egg white.

Then we use the pulp of this.

And to cut this, you use a knife, and notice that I cut here, again, in a jigsaw fashion, cutting around, gently cutting.

You know, if I were to do an apple, I would hold the end of it and press like this.

If I do that, it would squeeze the juice out of it.

So I go up and down like sewing, you know, and this is what you do with citrus fruit.

This is what you do with tomato, but this is not what you do with a potato or an apple, which is hard, you know.

You go all around like that, taking both skin, so that that grapefruit, is totally nude, if you want.

So we take it out and take the segment out.

Now, look, you cut between one segment and the other, you have a piece of fruit.

Now, at the next one, cut next to it and twist your knife around.

Next segment, again, twist your knife around.

And this is the classic way of removing the segment from orange, grapefruit, lemon, all of the citrus fruit.

Those very acid-type of fruit, make wonderful souffle.

You don't have to worry too much about that even if you leave a little bit of flesh in it because the flesh is really the juice.

And what we wanna do at the end, we want to press the rest of the juice, you know.

All I have left is the segment in between and, in this, I have done some ahead.

So here I'm doing a mess with those.

But I want to use some grenadine in there to a beautiful color and a bit of lemon juice.

And this is my sauce for the dessert.

As you can see, it has a beautiful color.

Nice, you could do a sherbet with that, it'd be great.

And now, so this is the first part.

The second part I wanna show you how to make crepe.

I have half a cup of flour here.

One egg.

A dash of sugar in it.

Salt, and you can put one, one and a half to two tablespoon of oil in it.

I have the milk and I put only a little bit of the milk to stir it.

You see what happened is that I want with my whisk to stir it to the extent at which I will have a thick dough.

You see if I have a thick dough here, the thread of the whisk will make it smooth.

That if I had put all the milk in it, then the protein in the milk, in the flour will coagulate and I will have nice, little dumpling all around, you know, little lump, which I don't want.

If I do it this way by putting a partial, a little bit of the milk, I get it smooth then I can put the rest of the liquid in it.

We're going to use a nonstick pan to do those crepe.

As you can see, you do a crepe batter in about 50 seconds.

You know, it goes very fast.

And I know that many recipe will tell you that it should rest.

It doesn't have to rest, really.

If it rests, it'll thicken a little bit and you may want to add a little more liquid, but you can use it right away.

I don't really see the difference much.

Now, this is very thin, as you can see, and I like it when it's thin.

Maybe on the first one, I spread it out, and you let it cook for about a minute.

What I have here is a nonstick pan, as I say, and you can see inside the pan here, you can see little hole all over the place here.

Those little hole make the crepe look like what we call a dentelle, you know.

And the dentelle we call in France, which is the lace, indicate, a very, very thin crepe.

Actually here, I may have put a little bit too much water in the batter.

Also, the first crepe will tend to stick until the pan get in the mood.

So you may have to discard the first crepe, just as I'm doing here.

Give it to the dog.

I already have the dog cooking next to me and they eat the crepe that I made a mess with.

Or in the first crepe, actually what I should have done is to butter or put a little bit of oil in the pan.

Now, the second one should go better.

Here it is here.

I wanna cook that for about a minute.

You cook the crepe about a minute.

It depend how you spread it out, you know.

See, this one will lift up better.

When you use a non-stick pan, of course, it helps a great deal.

What you do, you lift it up like this and then lift it up with your hand.

Turn it on the other side, which I think is the best way.

Now, this is a very thin crepe.

Look at this one.

This is what we call, it's kind of elastic.

You see, it hold quite well and you want it to be strong enough like this.

Now, you can flip it and put it there.

Notice that the crepe, I'll do another one again, you put it here in this part here and you spread it out and shake it to fill up the whole mold.

Cook it about a minute on one side, about 30 seconds on the other side.

I'm going to fill it up now to show you the rest of the recipe.

So I have here some little container that we are filling it up with this.

And I have here the mixture of four egg white beaten with inside the rind of the grapefruit.

So you fill that inside, bring the side of your crepe on top of it, and that's it.

This can go into the oven.

It takes about eight minute, about 400 degree.

I have one ready here, which I'm taking out.

Right here, I have the sauce that I'm going to put in the bottom of that plate right here.

A beautiful red sauce.

And this, take a towel, of course, to pull it out.

Help yourself, woop.

This way, to unmold it directly on top of your sauce.

Maybe a couple of green leaves around.

Well, the souffle won't wait for you, so you have to bring it to the table right away.

Although that type of souffle actually is terrific because it's made only with egg white and a bit of sugar, like a light meringue, you know?

So it will wait much more than any other type of souffle.

The whole menu is in front of us.

We have, of course, that veloute of spinach, which is really, for me, kind of nice for cooler as well as summer, frankly.

And now that lobster, have a beautiful, tender lobster with those grain, the couscous.

I know some of you may be worried about the tomalley or the liver, and if you want to omit it, of course, you can omit it.

It's perfectly fine.

And do the same thing with the couscous.

And finally, our dessert there, which is the citrus dessert, beautiful, at about 200 calories.

So it's quite a low dessert.

Actually, the whole meal together is under a 1,000 calorie.

We finish, of course, with a salad, maybe a little piece of bread and, of course, a nice glass of wine, Sauvignon Blanc from California.

I hope you enjoy our menu today.

Happy cooking.