- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

Planning a menu can be like planning a trip.

I love to combine the cuisines of different countries in an informal potpourri.

To keep the mood relaxed, choose dishes that are easy to prepare ahead of time, like melon in a port wine, a refreshing French summer classic, and chili con carne has just a bit of meat and lots of beans and savory seasonings.

Romaine salad is served with a creamy dressing and fresh herbs.

And for the dessert, sweet apple flakes dried in the oven and served with frozen yogurt.

Join me for some mixing and matching in the kitchen, it's a tasty potpourri, next on "Today's Gourmet."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) Today we're doing one of my favorite menu, or the way I like to cook, you know, a mixture of different type of things.

We call it a tasty potpourri.

An amalgam if you want, of different cooking styles.

We're going to start with a French summer classic, a melon with port wine, and then a south of the border specialty, you know, like chili with rice and so forth.

And the first thing that I wanna show you is the melon.

And I have a whole area of different melons here.

Your classic cantaloupe melon.

Then here we have the honeydew melon.

This is called a Christmas or Santa Clause melon.

This is the crenshaw.

And of course, this is the Sharlyn.

Different type.

It difficult, people always ask me, "How do you find when a melon is good?"

I smell it.

The weight of it, it should be heavy really.

It should smell good.

But frankly, most of the time, I pick up the wrong one anyway.

So I let my wife pick it up.

It's better.

She's better at it than me for that.

Today anyway, we're going to do only the honeydew melon, which I have here.

And I have started one, as you can see there, which is done.

One nice way of doing it is to use your melon baller here and to do ball with this that you can put into a large crystal thing like this.

Be sure that when you do that, you go totally around to have your ball as round as possible, you know, otherwise you only get half balls But see, you have to go inside and twist it around.

And again, you know, what we have done is the semi... Earlier I said honeydew, of course I meant cantaloupe.

And what we have done after basically is to use the trimming here and to use that to do a sauce with it.

And you can use a spoon as I'm doing here to pick up all of those trimming.

That's it, we don't never lose anything.

And we put it directly into the food processor.

You know, you should have approximately with a large melon like this, which I serve sometimes for four, you know, depending, or sometimes for two, you should have at least a good cup of trimming, you know?

So in any case, I have at least that cup of trimming here, and we're going to put it in there and emulsify it to get it nice and smooth.

(food processor whirring) And with that, what I want to do in there, I'll show you this one if you want here, if you wanna make it a bit more festive, you cut the edge into little points like this.

That'd be plenty for that.

You know, you would do a sherbet in the same way with this.

So you can go all around like that just to make it if you want a bit more festive to do little teeth like that.

Don't let the pieces of skin fall into the melon.

Okay, here have there.

See, this one is all seasoned.

That's what you would want to do.

And also with plain, it's fine also.

I put a little bit of port wine, and port wine, the best port wine is going to be a vintage port wine.

You know, it is going to be very good in there, but you do what you can afford.

And the juice from the sauce made from the trimming of the melon.

And that, you know, you would wanna put that in the refrigerator now to marinate it for a few hours.

It's really better if you let it marinate for a while.

And to serve it, you know, you can serve it as I have done it here in that half melon, you know, which would be very good.

Can I serve it on my hand?

Because otherwise I will tend to mess up the plate.

You know, you can serve one really portion this way, or then you can of course go to a beautiful goblet-type of crystal bowl like this and serve that right in there.

It would be very nice.

And on top of that, but I love to have it, a little bit of cracked pepper.

You know, a little bit of freshly cracked pepper.

Sometimes I even crack it with the back of a knife to get it even more coarse than that.

If you want, a little bit of a decoration here, why not a sage leave, you know?

A little sage, the sage have a very beautiful flavor.

There is so many different types of sage and different colors.

So this is our first course, and now let's get to the main course, which really is a type of chili con carne, you know?

And we do that usually with red beans.

And as you can see here, I have red beans.

The first thing you wanna do is to pick up little pebble like this, you know, either pebble or pieces of foreign matter, you know, that you want to do.

And as you go along like that, be sure to check it out, to check the whole thing out.

I have half a pound up.

Here's another piece somewhere here.

I have half a pound about of the red kidney beans.

Kidney beans are very good for you.

It is nature's perfect food, you know?

For the very time, you wash it carefully underneath here.

And of course the chili corn carne, if you do that in Texas, you know, the real chili I've had there doesn't even have any beans, it's all meat.

In our case here, it's much more beans really.

I have half a pound of meat here, and that meat is 10% or less in term of fat in it, so it's very, very lean.

And I put that directly in there with my beans for a cup of water.

And that's it.

You have your salt, the beans, the meat, and that's all you want to do.

You put it to cook, bring it to a boil, and you want to cook it slowly for one hour.

And this is what I have here.

This one has been cooking for one hour.

And as you see, it will go approximately four times in the amount of swelling that it's going to do.

Now we go to the second step, and the second step is a different garnish that I'm going to put in it.

And as you can see here, I have a head of garlic, I have some peeled garlic here.

I have some bay leaf, chili powder, cumin powder, thyme leaves, I'm putting some scallion, an onion, and tomato in there, and all of that.

And of course, the very hot jalapeno pepper here, you can put as much as you want of that type of seasoning.

So here, let me put our chili powder, the cumin powder.

I like it quite spicy.

The thyme powder, you know, a few bay leaf are going to go in there.

Remember to remove those bay leaf when you're ready to serve it.

Now my scallion, I can cut some of the scallion here and cut it coarsely, you know?

I like the different types not only for the color, the taste, and all that of that type of mixture, you know?

And onion, the onion, you can put as much as you want.

It's not that, you know, those type of recipe, you can take some liberty with it, you know?

Because it is a kind of very earthy type of food, some people may put a lot of cayenne, even extra hot pepper in it.

That's perfectly fine.

And garlic, for the garlic, I could put garlic this way, I could actually even put all garlic in there, because it's going to fall apart eventually as it's cooking, so it's perfectly fine.

Then my tomato.

And what I do also at the end in this, I put some cilantro.

And the cilantro that I have here, which is called cilantro, or cilantro in Italian, or coriandre in French, or coriander, or Chinese parsley, or Japanese parsley, it go under all of those names.

Usually, I keep the leaves to serve in garnish at the end, but all of the stems are going to go in there.

Actually, when my wife does that, she also put the roots.

If you get your cilantro with the roots, keep the roots, you know, wash it of course.

And this is what you use as a garnish, and it's really very, very good this way.

So this, we cover it like this, and after it cook for an hour the first time, you put all of your garnish in it and it cook for another hour.

So you want to cook that for a couple of hours.

I haven't even put my chili in it actually I will also.

And you can see that inside the chili, sometimes there is a lot of seed, the seed and the rim.

This is actually the hardest part of the chili.

So sometimes you may want to eliminate it.

So you cut all around just to keep the outside and leave that in.

And taste it, I would advise you touch it as I did with my finger because sometimes it's going to blow your mind.

You taste it and say, "It's really hot."

And the next time it tastes barely like, you know, like a sweet pepper practically.

So it does change a great deal.

This one happens to be pretty strong, you know, I just tasted it.

The stronger it is, frankly, the more you should cut it very, very fine, so it mix with the rest of the ingredients.

And again, it's a question of tolerance also.

You may like it very hot, you may not like it too hot.

So while this is cooking, let's do the rice.

And that's a very plain boiling rice.

I have a cup of rice here, long-grain Carolina type of rice, which I put in there in two cups of boiling water, it's one to two each time.

And a bit of salt in there.

And that's basically what you want, you bring it back to a boil, stir it a couple of times, cover it, cook it for 20 minutes.

And then for garnish, you know, you can I like to have some red onion served as a garnish for the chili.

What I do here, you wanna chop that nicely to serve in your dining room into little dice, you know?

(knife tapping) And I tell you, when you do that, what's important is your knife.

I have a good knife here.

And I know it, you know, it doesn't slide, it does its cuts straight.

And believe me, you will catch your finger much more when your knife is dull than it very sharp.

So I always try to keep my knife as sharp as I can.

This is a high-carbon steel knife.

Now, you see the stuff which discolors the onion and stings your eyes is a complex of sulfuric acid.

And that sulfuric acid will tend, as I say, not only to discolor the onion, but to sting your eyes.

It is however, water-soluble, meaning that if I chopped onion to serve in the dining room to serve caviar, or steak tartare, or carpaccio, or black bean soup, or one of those things, I take my onion, white or red onion, and I wash it in water.

You know?

I don't have enough water here quite, I can go to the sink, you know, to actually wash it under water here.

(faucet hissing) And you wanna wash it under water, that will remove that compound of sulfuric acid there.

And those onions will at that point stay white and fluffy.

They are not going to discolor anymore.

What you can do at that point is to put them into a towel, you know, to drain them out and keep them ready for your dining room.

So what I want to do now, my rice is boiling, I want to stir it just at that point.

Very easy to do rice, whether a chicken stock, this happens to be only water, cover it, lower your heat to very low, you know, very low, and 20 minutes, that's it.

I have some rice, which is finished here and I also have one of my chili which has been cooking for an hour here.

So let me take a look at it.

Yeah, that's it.

And you see the way it is still a little soupy?

I like it a bit soupy like this because I want it really to soak the rice in.

So we're going to serve it just the way it is now.

And for that I have a plate here, which is really very southwestern, if you want, or whatever.

So I think it's good looking.

The chili, another thing, it's very good to freeze it, you know, you can freeze it, and when you reheat it, even better.

I don't really care whether it fall apart.

I want it to fall apart.

I want it to be really very cooked.

Now, another thing which is very important also is the rice.

Rice and beans is a complimentary protein.

So if you cook beans, even without the meat that I put in there, and combine it with the rice and the beans, you have a full protein, complete protein, which is akin to a meat protein.

The beans and corn will do the same thing also.

But this is a classic service of doing it this way.

You can serve it separate or with it.

Usually I like to do a little bed of rice in the center of it, you know, in the center of... I mean, on the outside of the plate to keep that on the outside.

And with that now, we're going to serve.

That chili really smells good.

I can smell it for there.

As you see, the recipe is for four with we have here, but I think we will have plenty for six.

Although I tend to eat a lot of that stuff, you know?

I love it, and, you know, when you eat that, it's basically a whole meal in itself.

I would serve that with it, maybe a little bit of the red onion if you want on top, a few little sprigs.

And don't remember your cilantro, remember that we put the stem of the cilantro in there.

You want to put the leaves on top of it.

I mean, I love cilantro, some people don't like it.

But if you love it and are addicted to it like me, put a lot on top of it and enjoy it.

(upbeat music) You know, I serve salad every day at my house.

One salad I used to do when I was a kid from Bourg-en-Bresse where I come from in France, we use a lot of cream there with a salad with a cream basic dressing, you know?

And we're going to show it how to do it today, but slightly different.

You can use any type of salad, but the classic like that romaine lettuce is excellent.

There is nothing that you lose here.

What you want to do is to break your salad, and by the time you get to the large rib, you know, cut the rib in half if you want, and then break it in two again.

This would be the way I would cut my salad.

Don't forget the piece here, because this is the best part of it.

I mean, this is what I slice in my salad, you know, very thin like this.

And I serve it.

We call it a (speaks in foreign language).

Sometimes in restaurants when I was a kid, when we'd do four, five case of salad, we could remove all of those and cook them (speaks in foreign language) like a kind of cooking with a little bit of olive oil and lemon juice and all that served whole.

And it's great.

It's important to wash your salad and dry it properly.

I usually wash it directly in that mixer with a lot of water.

Take it without dumping it, because any sand will go back in it.

Just lift it out of the water, put it directly into the sieve there, or the basket, if you want.

Then you turn it around.

(basket whirring) We used to do that with a long thing by hand and shaking it.

But this is really good, and it takes most the water out.

I mean, you wouldn't believe how much water.

Look at what I have here, you know?

I would say I had a 1/3 of a cup of water.

If I didn't put that in there, then that would dilute my dressing entirely.

So I have about six, eight cups of lettuce here, about half a teaspoon of salt, even maybe a bit les, a quarter, 'cause I'm going to put yogurt and yogurt doesn't need much salt with it, but half a teaspoon of freshly ground pepper.

Then maybe a tablespoon, tablespoon and a half of white vinegar.

And then maybe now I will put a good like three tablespoons of yogurt, you know?

Then you mix it together, and this is what we do, a salad Bressane.

When I was a kid we used to do that, but of course, it was done with heavy cream.

And it's very good too.

And a little bit of enrichment if you want with oil.

I put maybe a tablespoon of oil at the most for a salad for like six here.

That basically what I want to do here.

So what you do, you mix your salad, you don't wanna do that too much ahead of course because it may get wilted.

But you will dress it, you can dress it up to 10, 15 minutes ahead, you know?

Always have a big bowl to mix a little bit of salad because it always fall off.

I know mine always fall off the mark and on the table and all that.

When I was a kid, you know, we used to tell the kids each piece of salad will fall off the salad bowl one year before you get married, you know?

It doesn't really work.

But in any case, we put a lot of herbs in there.

See, I have tarragon here.

And just put big piece of tarragon leaves here.

I love tarragon, very pungent taste.

I have chives here.

Likewise, you know, sometimes I do the herb in small pieces, but I like it in large pieces like that too.

I have basil.

Look at that red purple basil.

It's beautiful here, and very fragrant.

I can smell it, you know?

So you put all of that on top, and all the herbs you have in your garden.

And here I have chervil.

I love chervil.

It is a very delicate type of taste, and I arrange it in large pieces like this.

And basically you would not want to stir that into your salad because it will get wilted.

So just leave it like that.

When you're ready, you bring it to the table.

And now I wanna show you how to do apple flake.

I have apple flake, as you can see here.

And those they are thinly sliced apples which are dried out in the oven.

When they come out of the oven like that, they tend to stick, so be sure to start right away up to move them with a spatula because they will tend to dry.

You see how dry they are?

Very easy to do.

You can even keep them for snacks for the kids.

I have some, a whole bunch here that you put into a container in plastic like that.

Cover it tightly and keep it.

I have some apples here.

I have Golden Delicious, I have Granny Smith, and I have Opalescent here.

When I am in the country in Connecticut, in winter, we get up to 20 different type of apples.

The first thing that I do with my thumb, remove the top, and I may even keep that for decoration.

And then after you cut your apple into thin slice like this, approximately eight, eight of an inch, you know?

So look at that, with one apple you can probably do a whole tray, you know, of apple.

Here we are.

And this is great.

The kids love it, you know?

Now, conventionally, some people put a little bit of oil or sometimes sugar in it.

I don't put anything.

You see what I have here where I have the seed?

If you want you can cut the center of it from that part or even with the other side just getting a little piece toward the center.

But as you've seen, I may have shown you some here, those haven't been cleaned, and it makes a nice design even if you leave the seed in, so you can leave them.

So what we want to do now is to put them into the oven, as I say, this is done ahead.

I have here an apple, a cookie sheet which is a non-stick cookie sheet.

So that's very good for that.

But even the other ones will work perfectly fine.

So that's all you do.

You put that into 250 degree oven, about 250 degree oven.

I like to do that in a convection oven because the pulsating of air, air blowing around tends to dry it even better, for like an hour.

And that's all there is to it.

We serve that today with an ice cream, or it is a yogurt ice cream.

And the yogurt ice cream we have here, we're going to serve it very simply a bowl of ice cream.

You put it, as you can notice, I took that out of the refrigerator, because you want to take it outside of your freezer and put it in the refrigerator maybe an hour before you serve it, you know?

And with that, you can put all of those flake around, you can stick it directly to the ice cream.

You can arrange them in any way that you like.

They work out very well, like a little case, and maybe one of those in the center as a little decoration.

And that make a nice, a little unusual type of dessert.

Mm, those are so good, you know, those apple flakes.

I'm going to put a few more around the plate.

I could eat a whole bowl of that, which I do sometimes.

When you want to do this, you know, you can bring those apple flakes directly to the table.

You can even break them on top of the salad.

It works very well.

Remember, there is no sugar or nothing in it.

But what you would have to do however, do it at the last moment because this is going to eventually melt pretty fast.

So we have a really interesting potpourri today, kind of international mixed menu, you know.

Starting with our melon, this is the cantaloupe, of course, with a bit of port wine and cracked pepper on top.

Then we have the chili, and my chili is done with the rice around.

It is very highly seasoned.

It's a bit soupy, the way I like it.

Flavored on top with the cilantro.

Then our salad with all the herbs and that type of yogurt dressing, very astringent, lemony.

It's very good.

And eventually, of course, we have our apple flake.

Now, that type of menu is the type of menu that you relax with, you know?

You can serve practically anything with it.

I mean, I would serve beer very often at home.

I love beer.

And, you know, very often with that type of menu, you do that.

However, today I've chosen to serve a rosé, you know?

And the rosé, this is a rosé from the southwest of France.

Very inexpensive.

This is a rosé of Syrah, a type of grape, the Syrah.

Often now they call that blush wine.

They are very dry wine.

We used always to think of rosé as very sweet.

But those are extremely dry, they are served very cold, you know, like white wine.

And they are really terrific, in the South of France it's served a lot and people are getting back to using a bit of rosé again.

So I hope with our make-ahead dinner, easy from the beans to the apple flake, I hope you're going to enjoy making it for your friend.

I really enjoyed making it for you.

Happy cooking.

(mellow music)