- I love hot salsa or so-called pico de gallo and I make my own with tomato, cilantro, garlic, hot pepper, cumin, a dash of cumin, fair amount of onion, salt, lime juice, and I always put a dice of ketchup in it to thicken it.

You mix it and that's it.

You can serve that with fish, with anything you want, or simply with tortilla, easy and delicious.

I'm Jacques Pepin and this is "Fast Food My Way."

Happy cooking.

I am doing a great menu today with all kind of dishes that you can use in a large buffet.

One of my favorite thing to do during the summer.

You have everything ready.

And then, bring everything to the table, the guest and the food, so that you can sit down and enjoy it with the guest.

One of the first thing that I want to do is asparagus.

Now peel those asparagus and I'm going to saute those in olive oil.

And in the olive oil, I'm gonna put bread, a kind of crunchy bread like this, you know, that you use.

I use sometime leftover bread to do those crouton as well as chorizo, which is the red spicy sausage from Spain also.

I love those sausage and they kind of turn the food slightly red because there is paprikash in it and hot pepper.

So you cut them into dice.

And another staple of Spanish cooking is almond and I'm going to put almond in there too.

But here we go in there, we cook everything together.

Almond, those are unpeeled almond and bread, already look good, so.

Then of course, the asparagus.

I have got a good pound of asparagus here and they are nice, the fat one, nice and firm.

I like the fat asparagus.

Cut them into like two-inch chunk, you know?

And as you can see, I have peeled the bottom part, the bottom third part of the asparagus.

Otherwise, it's too fibrous and you have to discard it and it's a shame.

With a good vegetable peeler, it's a cinch.

Salt.

Pepper in it.

And that's it.

Now that's gonna cook about five, six minutes.

You want your star to be crunchy, nice.

I don't want them raw, but I want them slightly crunchy.

And next, the main course, we're going to do a slab of salmon, probably in a way that you've never seen it done to start with.

You know, you would want to remove, when you buy salmon, you will remove, that's better on this side for me.

Run your hand like that with the whole set of bone.

So you would want to remove those bones.

Use that one of those tiny plier, you know, is good.

That's cleaned up, another one here.

That's it.

So now we want to remove the skin also.

And for that, I have to go back the other way because I start at the tail.

Cut it gently in there.

Now grab the end of the tail and you're going to use the technique to remove the skin.

Now your knife is not flat, it's not horizontal or flat, it's somewhere in between.

And what you want to do is move it in a jigsaw fashion and you alternate it with the skin in the same way.

And that basically you remove that skin and that skin, frankly, you can put it into the oven if it has been scaled like this have been and do crackling with it.

It's going a bit fast here, so I'm going to reduce it.

Now make sure that all of the skin is out.

I have a little piece left here.

And under, you can see that just under the skin here, there is that black flesh on each side.

This is actually fatty tissue which protect the animal in the cold water.

But that fatty tissue, you know, it kind of turn black when it cooked and it's stronger in tastes.

So it's conventional to remove it.

Although for example, in Japanese cooking, that would consider to be one of the best parts, you know?

Now, my salmon is totally clean.

What I'm going to do is to put salt and pepper on each side.

Because this is a piece of salmon, which is I would say about 3 1/2 tons, that's a large salmon.

And that would serve on a buffet like 15, 20 people, you know?

So I oil it on one side and the other side, just a little bit.

And we are going to put that on our serving platter.

In the tray, I put that in the oven, I cook it in the oven this way, right on the serving platter.

And the beauty of it is that I do that around 200 degree.

Can do it at 225.

So you don't have to worry about your plate, you know, cracking into the oven.

So it's a slow way of cooking.

Fish, salmon, other thing, you can cook this way too.

This is fine now, I'm going to shut it up.

And with the salmon here, what I want to do is to put a piece of bread on top of the salmon here.

I probably have way too much here.

That should be enough.

To cover, fresh bread crumb and hazelnut.

I have roasted hazelnut here.

I love hazelnut.

Do a mixture of this.

(food processor crackles) That's it, it takes second to do fresh bread crumb in the food processor and this will go on top of the salmon.

And that's going to go into the oven and we'll finish it with herb and with a sauce that I'm going to do later on.

So the first thing you do, we put that into the oven.

This is heavy, 200 degree.

Okay, and now you can do the sauce for the salmon because that type of thing can be done ahead.

And I'm going to do it with dry tomato which is very good with this.

And I have some salsa, so-called pico de gallo or hot salsa.

If I do that, make sure that give me the peppery thing that I want to have in there.

Make a puree out of it.

And now I want to combine this with mayonnaise.

Now you can do your own mayonnaise, but you know, commercial mayonnaise is perfectly fine for this, kind of spicy sauce, you know?

Which is going to go quite well with the salmon.

You can use that sauce actually for other things.

Can use it, you know, with cold cut or stuff like this.

Be fine, I'm gonna test it.

I think it need more pepper.

Should be quite spicy for that, you know?

Okay, now this is fine.

I think that I'm going to just place my asparagus in there.

I have a beautiful dish of asparagus here.

And oh, I should put some chives in my salsa here, give it a bit of color in the so, so fresh chive or tarragon or usually, you know, I go by what I have in the garden most of the time.

Chives, of course, I have it from beginning of the summer until the end of the summer.

So here is my salsa.

And now what I want to do is to work on the first course and for that a very classic mixture of melon and prosciutto.

Try to pick up a ripe melon, which is not easy at the market.

And there is different way of cutting it, you know?

I like to peel it just like your peel an apple.

And you wanna peel it thick enough so that the green color, you know, there is a first layer where you cannot do it with a vegetable peeler.

Otherwise, you will have to do it two or three times to get really to the flesh of the melon.

Okay, it's a long peel of melon.

So this, well, we can cut it this way or this way actually.

Very often, you know, we cut melon this way when we want to fill them up.

Sometime, you fill it up with like port wine or thing like that and it's a nice combination.

This maybe I should put my seed in there.

Okay, here we are.

Again, and that melon is not the best melon I ever seen, but we're going to jazz it up to cut it into pieces, into large square like that of melon.

Actually, it's not bad.

It's not great but it's not bad.

I like to put cracked pepper on it.

I put black pepper, black peppercorn.

Crush it with a skillet.

If you run it, you can hear it crack when you run it in front of you, that's how, basically with cracked pepper and we call that mignonette in France.

Sometime, you see, I receive people at teaspoon of mignonettes, say, what is mignonette?

Just cracked pepper.

When you run the skillet on top, it doesn't make any more noise, you know it's cracked.

See, that's how you do steak au poivre, you spread that out and you dip your steak into it.

So I like the cracked pepper and in large piece here.

It'd give really a great taste to the melon.

I'm gonna put that here now.

On top of this, I put lemon or lime juice.

You know, you can put one or the other: lemon or lime juice.

And in addition to that, a great thing is fleur de sel, the flower of salt, which is a very coarse salt that you can find now from France, from Italy, from different part of the country, the sweetness.

And this is usually the salt which is harvested on top of the water when it dries out.

It becomes slightly pinkish and they pick it up.

That's what they call a flower of salt.

It's right at the surface of the water and it's very delicate and quite expensive.

And then, you can arrange your prosciutto, you can wrap it around, or actually in that case, you know?

Might as well do it this way.

Let it fall wherever it fall, you know your prosciutto that way.

Okay, you can put even a little more, you know, a sprinkle of pepper on the prosciutto and this is it.

(slow gentle light music) Now what I wanna show you, I do what I call a fromage fort strong cheese with any kind of leftover cheese.

My wife become a specialist of that.

She take all the cheese, clean out a bit of the green stuff, mold around, put everything in the food processor, a lot of garlic, white wine, make a puree that we call fromage fort strong cheese.

As my father used to make, put that on bread, eat it as such or put it under the broiler, serve it with salad.

That's a great way of using it.

This is a bit different.

I have all can again of leftover cheese here.

And in that case, what you do, well if the cheese is very soft like that blue here, you know what you can do?

Well, remove some of that, then crumble pieces into it.

You know, for the blue cheese.

Certainly if it's soft, the same thing with the camembert and all that.

Not for that, a type of gouda like that is hard.

So cut it into little dice.

And again, you know?

This is not really a recipe.

What you do, you use whatever you have leftover of your cheese and it's a nice way of using it.

You know, very often, restaurants don't buy cheese at home because cheese is very expensive and very perishable.

And people say, well you know, if I don't serve it, what am I going to do with it?

So they keep it longer though it gets worse.

Finally, they serve it.

By then, it's no good.

So people are not going to buy it again.

So it's like in a vicious circle.

If you have a few recipe to know what to do with your cheese besides eating it as I do, then it helps, you know?

So I mean, you get the idea here, any type of cheese, mm, that's good.

That's a comte cheese, which is a kind of Swiss cheese from the Jura part of France, you know, that's great.

What I do in there, we put raisins, you know, you can put the dark raisins, of course all the light one.

I like to put toasted pumpkin seed, that's what it is, and honey.

That amount of honey, so it's a nice mixture.

And then, pepper and a fair amount of pepper also.

And you want to toss this around so that it kind of glue together, you know?

Or you know, what's good in it too is lime juice.

And actually, I need a bit more liquid here.

So you know, rub your lime like this or put it in the microwave oven 10 second or drop it in boiling water, 10 second.

Any of this will break the fiber inside and you get much more juice out of it.

This is your best strainer that you have, your finger.

Of course in the lime, there is no seed, but here we are.

Yeah, that's more the consistency that you want.

Taste it.

Well, good stuff.

And then, you do a couple of tray like this.

I bet you that's what's going to go first on your buffet.

Let's prepare it here.

That's it.

And you can go on.

You know, with that amount of cheese, I'm sure you can do 100 or 150 of those.

(rapid light piano music) I like to put a lot of syrup on that cake, you know?

It absorbs into the cake and give it a lot of moisture.

This is a large cake, but the standard recipe that I do with actually that one and that really very easy to do.

All you do is you take the almond paste, the sugar, the butter, the vanilla, you put all of that in the bowl of your food processor, about 10 seconds.

Then, you add your eggs, the milk, the salt, at five seconds.

Then the flour, baking powder, a few more seconds.

Then you put it into your buttered pan, in the oven, 350 degree, about 45 minutes.

So it's quite easy to do.

And this one now should unmold easily.

It does.

And as you can see, I have the large one, this is the standard size.

So any type of pan that you have, you can build it up and create a nice type of wedding cake, you know?

Actually, this is what I did for the engagement party of my daughter.

When she came, I did a cake like that.

I think that's when I tried the recipe first.

Now the cake by itself is really an almond cake and it's quite good just by itself and what we call a breton in France, you know, a cake breton is something similar, and another one.

So this is not, you know, maybe your beautiful standard wedding cake, but it's nice.

And actually if you had more time, you know you can put your syrup and let it soak into it.

You can even put the syrup on the other side also.

And for the syrup, you mix together water from the tap, sugar, whiskey, all in about equal proportion.

Good, and now fruit, you know?

Any kind of berry actually in there, you know, I just dump it right on top of it, you know?

So I wouldn't worry too much.

Well, maybe a little more than I did where it fell.

But you want to put berry all around and you can actually put dry fruit also.

You know, if you wanna put raisin, dry apricot, stuff like this, it will be good.

We have, of course, strawberry here, you know?

You can have boysenberry, you can have blackberry, of course, raspberry.

I love raspberry.

That's it.

Then on top of this, what I like to put is the apricot glaze and we have an apricot glaze here.

So the best apricot jam that you can get.

You put it on top.

So that cake, you know, you cut it into pieces and you have that with a nice creme fresh or whipped cream or even sour cream, you know?

All of that would work quite well with it.

The more the better, you know?

Too much of a good thing can be absolutely wonderful, isn't that the saying?

Or something to that effect.

And on top of it, maybe for a little more decoration, you can put a bit of green, you know?

You have those leaves of mint and they're extremely fragrant actually, smells so good.

That's really a kind of summer berry cake.

(gentle light piano music) The salmon should be sort of tepid, you know, a room temperature.

And I like to cover it with a mixture of fresh herb from the garden.

Especially if it seeps around a little bit like this, the salmon is great.

It's a new way of cooking it.

I can see that the inside is barely, barely done, you know, still slightly, slightly rare and that's how you want it or that's how I like it.

Put it back into place.

Put more herbs on top.

No one knows I've been here to check my salmon.

With a beautiful buffet like that, what else but a glass of champagne.

Very often, people want to chill champagne.

They put ice in the bucket.

It doesn't work out.

What you have to do, you have to put water, you know?

Put water, then it goes into it, and then you put some salt in the water.

The salt itself will lower the temperature of the brine of the liquid and make it chill much faster.

In any case, when you want to, when you're ready for champagne, which is a thing that I'm always ready for.

So you want to open it, you know, take the cage out of it, keep your, you know, thumb on top of it so it doesn't go all over the place, it can be dangerous.

And what you want to do actually is to hold it on top.

You don't really want to turn the cork.

You want to turn the bottle.

Turn the bottle rather than the cork and it should come on a nice little pop like this.

That's it, usually you pour twice.

You know, the first time you have a lot of foam, then it goes down, and then you pour again and again and again.

We'll have a beautiful buffet here for you.

That cake, you will serve it in wedge with more berry with cream.

Your asparagus can also be great at room temperature.

Of course, your prosciutto.

This is a great menu where you want to be your own guest, that is everything can be prepared ahead so you can enjoy your guest as well as your food.

I hope you do it for your friend.

Happy cooking.