- Hi, I'm Jacques Pépin.

One way to judge a good cook is to see how well they can prepare great food without spending a lot of money.

Today, I will show you how to create a budget feast, starting with grilled squid, one of the least expensive seafood, served on a bed of watercress.

A lean pork roast flavored with honey, ginger, and cayenne pepper, and Dauphinoise potato.

It's a dish from my hometown in Lyon.

For dessert, Frozen Black Velvet, which is frozen yogurt garnished with Kahlúa and fig.

You don't need to spend a lot of money to create beautiful and delicious food.

I will show you on "Today's Gourmet."

(uptempo jazz music) (uptempo jazz music continues) You know, one thing that I love to do in the kitchen is to do a meal with very little money, and a great meal, you know.

People are always surprised because people always think, or many people, that you have to spend a lot of money to do something good.

And that's what we're going to do today.

A very inexpensive type of budget food, you know.

We're going to have squid grilled, and potato, a roast of pork, and a terrific dessert.

And I'm going to start with putting a little bit of oil on that skillet to sauté the potato.

Those potato we do where I am from in Lyon, we call that a paillasson.

Paillasson means a doormat.

This is what the Swiss call the rösti potato.

And those are shredded potato.

I use a cheese grater here.

You could use anything you want.

You want to cut them the long way to have long strips.

And you see the potato, I can, I could peel those potato ahead and keep them in water.

They would not discolor and it's fine, but I don't.

After I shred the potato here, I don't like to put them back in the water.

If you put them back in the water after, then it wash out all the starch and your doormat, or your potato here is not going to hold very well.

Now be sure when you use that shredder to use the potato like I'm doing here, the long way, and putting them flat with my hand is flat on top of it, you see, so that I don't cut myself.

Even if I go like that with my hand doesn't cut myself.

This would be more dangerous.

So I go to the, and I have those potato here, that we put in there.

I have three potato here, a good pound of potato.

And what we wanna do, actually, I put a little piece of butter also here, half a tablespoon about of each.

And what we wanna do is to first splash your potato so that all of the potato are kind of (skillet sizzling) wet, you know, or moistened with the butter and the oil.

And after that, I wanna put a bit of scallion for color in it.

I have four scallion here, cut the end of it, and a little bit of the green.

If you feel that it's a bit too strong, or damaged, and we wanna chop that coarsely to add it to our potato.

I could use chives in it, you know, or even leek for that matter.

We use a lot of leek where I come from in France.

And the leek are, of course, a bit more expensive for our menu today than that would be.

So that goes with our potato here.

A dash of salt on top of this.

And what you wanna do is with the tine of a fork, you know, you want to mix up your potato, you know, spread them out this way so that, as I said the butter and the oil is all over.

And when you're sure that they are all nice and moist, then you can use a large spatula to press it into a more compact type of a cake if you want, it's like a potato cake.

Then you cover it, and that's going to cook now for a few minute, you know, about eight, 10 minute to get warm.

And I'm going to put this one here.

I have one here which should be about at that level now cook on each side.

So this is the time now where you can flip it, you know, you can flip it this way, or if you don't want to, you put it back.

You can flip it with the top of, you know, a large lid like that and turn it upside down, and you can slide it back into the skillet.

That may be a bit easier this time to stick to it.

We can use this.

Actually, what I'm going to do is to put it back the way it was here and flip it this way, all right.

My lid is a bit too, you have to have a flat lid so that it can slide into it.

Now I leave it open this way so that it brown on the other side.

And while this is browning on the other side, the main course of the dish is going to be a roast of pork.

And the roast of pork is going to be seasoned, cooked slowly with different thing.

I have cumin here, I have mustard, I have ginger, and I have cayenne, you know, and we're going to mix some of those together.

You know, a lot of the cumin, the mustard, the ginger is fine, a little bit of the cayenne, that's much stronger, of course.

So it's a highly spicy type of thing.

A tiny bit of oil, maybe like half a tablespoon.

A little bit of honey, which is going to give us that sweet, and in the same time flavorful, and a bit of soy sauce.

So you do that marinate here that you can mix with a whisk, or with your hand.

And we're going to roast, rub that around our roast.

And here is the roast.

Now you see I have a loin of pork here.

People think that pork is fatty, and it is fatty.

The idea, however, is to remove all of the fat from the top, which I'm doing here.

And to have the proper cut.

The cut that I have here is, you know, when you have a chop, when you have a pork chop, this would be the center of the pork chop, you know.

Either this or the loin which continue.

And that piece doesn't have more fat or cholesterol than chicken strangely enough.

If it's cleaned properly first, and if you pick up that particular cut, you know, so it is important to know in the butcher what to pick up, yeah?

Now this kind of, of course, to dry out more.

So this is why we are doing it.

Oh, I need this.

We're doing it with that marinate here.

We're going to dip it into it, you know, and it's going to give color and a lot of taste to it.

And you could let that marinate for a couple of hours if you have time.

Then we put it to cook at relatively low temperature, about 275 degree.

And we cook it slowly for a couple of hours, and you turn it a couple of time while it's cooking, you know.

So what we're going to do is to put that in the oven.

I can lower my potato now.

And pick up another one, which is cooked here.

Now what happened is that during the last 15 minute, or half an hour of cooking, I put half a cup of water around, and there was some solidified juice that melt, and that create a sauce of its own, you know.

And we're going to present that.

It's quite lean, you know, the way it is.

And I have a little bit of salad here.

This is actually arugula, which is a type, a very garlicky type of salad that I love in summer.

I have a lot in my garden to put here on our roast.

And what we wanna do here is to cut that into thin slice.

This can come here.

So you wanna cut that on a bias like this into fairly thin slice.

And you will have a couple of slice, two or three slice per person if you do it this way, you know.

It's a nice idea to put, I like to put the rest of the roast right on top, and arrange that in front.

Of course, we have that deep, rich, dark sauce here, you know, with the cayenne and all that stuff on top.

I'm gonna put some on top of it here, and bring it here.

Some of the arugula right around here for a bit of color, and a bit of taste, you know.

That salad is quite flavorful, you know.

If you don't have that salad, of course, put a bit of watercress, or any other type of herb that you have in your garden.

And now I think we can serve our potatoes.

See, the potato are brown on the other side also.

So they could be served.

Choose the side which is the nicest.

Maybe this one has more contrast.

So I may slide this directly onto it.

Put a couple of chives on top of it here if you want, for decoration underneath, you know, a bit different, or we could cut a little bit of the chives on top of it in this way.

I always love chive.

And remember we put scallion in it, too.

And this would be a terrific accompaniment for our roast of pork.

And now our first course, I'm gonna show you what to do with squid.

You can buy the squid just as I have here.

They are totally clean, you know, this is the top, this is the body, or you can do it yourself.

It's not really complicated.

The whole squid like this, we'll have to pull out the tentacle here, and cut the head off and there, or on the other side there is that little beak which comes out.

That's it, that's all we do to this.

Then you put it to wash.

The body, however, you have to pull the inside, and in the back of it here there will be a piece of bone, which is actually a cartilage that we have here we call the pen.

It's just like a piece of cartilage.

So you have to take this out and then remove the skin as you can see comes out quite easily.

Then press out whatever is inside, you know, the guts and so forth.

You know, when I was in Greece, I remember in Greece we had this it was totally cleaned, so, you know, you can do it this way.

Now I cleaned that up, put them back here and what you wanna do now is to blanche it.

You know, I could put that directly on the grill, but believe me, it is much better if you drop it in boiling water first.

It firm up the body.

Makes it much easier to use.

And, you know, it doesn't even have to come back to a boil.

While it's cooking for a couple of minute, I have some here which are totally done, and I wanna cook those.

And those are cooking, you know, like a minute on each side, on a very, very hot grill as you can see here.

So this are ready now.

As you can see, the way they firm up.

Actually, this is the way I do it, even for a salad, you know, you could do it.

So they didn't even come back to a boil, and they get that beautiful kinda pinkish color, but, you know, as I was saying, when I was in Greece, I remember going there where we could have, put some of that water here, we had grilled squid like that, and they would take them unclean, you know, with the skin on top of it, just wash them and put them directly on the barbecue.

And that was very good too.

So what I wanna do, turn those, you know, take a towel for something hot because they will cook as I say, quite fast.

See, they just get a little bit grilled.

And this here, what you do very simply, we put them on skewer.

You know, you put a head and a body, a head and a body, and so forth.

And I would say that in those small squid like that, you would wanna use about four, maybe five squid per person, you know, depending actually, whether you're gonna serve that are the first course, or are the main course.

In our case here they are the first course, and the tentacle are absolutely beautiful.

So this is it, you know, you can prepare that ahead, just drop it on the barbecue as I did.

And with this we're going to serve a watercress salad underneath.

I have watercress here, and what I will do is to put a little bit of cherry vinegar, a dressing in there, a dash of salt, a lot of cracked pepper.

(pepper mill grinding) A little dash of peanut oil here.

Just very, very simple.

Remember that watercress, you do have to clean it, dry it well, and toss it at the last minute, otherwise, it's going to get wilted.

So here what happened here, I have all the stem that I cut off, and this is what we see down here lightly to put under our squid.

However, when I clean up those, all the lower part of this, we didn't discard it, I made a soup with it, because in the thrifty kitchen you don't lose anything.

And I have the soup right here.

I have potato, an onion, the watercress pieces in it.

And all you wanna do is to make a puree out of this, or partially puree, you know.

(immersion blender whirring) Directly into the thing with a little machine like this.

You know, you could blend that for a while, and you get a very creamy mixture, or you can leave it slightly chunky.

I tend to like it chunky, so.

Probably leave it at this, you know, this is easy.

You can dip it directly and wash it in water.

And I think before I serve the soup I'm going to remove those squid because they are cooked enough.

You see, they are just brown, and, ooh, they tend to explode.

You don't wanna overcook them, but you want them to be cooked.

And this is real hot.

I'm gonna take this out here.

Then my soup.

The soup is, of course, a bonus, it's free.

Didn't cost anything with the stem.

Not quite free, there is a potato in it, there is an onion, a little bit of oil, but look at that, you get a nice creamy soup here.

And you know that type of soup what you can do, you can serve that hot as I'm doing here.

You can also serve it cold.

You serve it cold just like we do it.

We call it vichyssoise in France.

You cool it off.

When it's cold, you put a bit of milk in it, and you put little leaves, you know, of watercress are the garnish on top of it, you know, which would look good and serve it cold, or even a julienne, you know, chop that coarsely.

That make a terrific cold soup.

You know what you can do also, you can freeze.

If you decide that you don't want to use the bottom of that watercress, freeze it.

You can even sauté it.

And after it's sautéd and wilted, you put it in a little container in the freezer.

You need a soup at the last moment, defrost that, put a potato in it, or a bit of pasta, any of that stuff, you put it in it and you do a terrific soup for free in a few minutes, you know?

So what we wanna do to put that on top.

As I say, you know, the watercress will, the watercress will wilt very fast.

So we want to arrange it on top here, nice and green at the last minute, you know.

I do in the garden, you know, I have watercress at my house in Connecticut because I have a brook behind my house, and I plant my own watercress, but to do a mixed salad like this, what I do very often I take five or six package of different lettuce, red ruby lettuce, iceberg even, any type of lettuce.

I mix it in a little bowl like this, all the seed.

And I go to the garden and I plant that the same way you plant grass, yeah?

And it grows very tight.

When, again, they are that high.

And then I go directly to the garden and cut, like, a bowl of salad.

I don't re-plan the salad, or anything like this.

That's a great way of, that's a great way of doing the garden and your salad.

So what we'll do here, we put that directly on top of it.

And you see, the squid here is to start with extremely inexpensive.

Remember that if you buy, for example, a lobster, if it's a pound lobster, it gives you about four ounce of meat, one to four.

If you have a grouper, one of those type of fish, it's about one to three.

If you buy a salmon, a 10 pound salmon gives you about 50% of its weight in flesh.

If you have squid, or octopus, or that type of thing, it's about 75 to 80%.

So it's very, very inexpensive.

And as I say, again, you can buy it totally clean at the market, very easy.

You can do salad with it, you can stuff it.

Very often inside the cavity here we do a stuffing with the tentacle.

We chop those tentacle with a bit of mushroom, onion.

You stuff it right into it, and cook that with a little bit of a tomato sauce.

Serve that on rice, that's terrific.

See, here it should be chewy and elastic with a strong taste of the grill, you know.

And that's basically the way I like it.

You can even at that point, if you want, brush it with a little bit of oil.

Want it shiny, a little bit of olive oil on top.

Those happen to be small squid, you know.

Sometime they are very large squid, and the very large squid, if you blanche them, what I showed you here and cook them in the same way are going to be very tender.

And now I think we're going to finish and do our dessert.

So for the dessert today we're doing a lean ice cream.

What I have, actually, is a frozen yogurt.

And, of course, your frozen yogurt, you can have it regular yogurt, you can have low-fat yogurt, you can have no fat yogurt.

And that will go down and down and down in term of the amount of calorie in it.

Remember, that half a cup of ice cream is going to be close to, like, 300 calorie, 200 to 300 calorie.

Half a cup of yogurt is going to be about a hundred calorie, you know.

There is about three gram of fat, you know.

In that amount of yogurt you're going to have 15 gram of fat in the same thing on a regular ice cream.

So we have a beautiful goblet here.

What you can do when you do something like this, you can dress it up, you know, make it look nice.

And, you know, actually it is quite rich even by itself too.

So you have a nice bowl of yogurt.

If you wanna splurge a little bit, especially if you have a big one as we have here, you put maybe one and a half, you know, and be sure to place that back in your freezer.

In our case here, I put a little bit of Kahlúa.

Kahlúa is a coffee liqueur, which is going to go well with it.

If you don't want any alcohol, just omit it.

It's perfectly fine.

I have some coffee beans here covered with chocolate.

And those are crystallized violet.

The crystallized violet, you know, those are actually the flower itself, the violet, which is cooked in sugar and crystallized, edible flowers.

And we have fig here, you can cut.

Those are Calimyrna fig.

You can cut them into wedge, you know, to put them around, and that dress up your thing.

You know, you can do a lot with ice cream, or with frozen yogurt just by dressing it up with a couple of dry fruit, cocoa beans, any of that stuff.

And makes you a very unusual, delicious, and interesting dessert, you know.

You need to be thrifty in the kitchen doesn't mean that the food has to look like quoi.

You know, you can have it looking beautiful.

And that's what I wanna show you.

The dessert looks beautiful, but we can also arrange any other type of food to make it look nice with lemon.

Lemon would go fine, and tomato.

This is green, and so forth.

Now look at the lemon, you know, you can cut the end of it, and just instead of cutting a regular lemon in two, you can cut it and making, like, teeth and people do that, but look at this, what I'm cutting here.

I'm cutting it on a bias, you know.

It's not straightforward little triangle that I cut into it.

And it's going to give a beautiful effect, you know, and that doesn't cost more.

And it really bring the food to another level of sophistication when you do it this way.

So here, let's put it together.

And you can see here, this is going to be quite nice if you wanna put it at the end of your dish here.

You can put a little bit of green in the center of it, you know, parsley, or whatever you want, you know, that would look great.

And I can cut the lemon in another way.

You can cut it directly in half like this.

And you can cut the side of the skin like this to have that hanging.

And then you can make a knot with that.

Like a knot like this.

And you can even have that come back into this to do a loop, you see?

And that loop here now, you could fill that up with some green, you know, again, and that could be served in different way also.

With a tomato, you know, you could do a rose with the skin of a tomato.

And notice that I cut the base here, and I start moving my knife in a jigsaw fashion to give a certain texture, you know, to the edge.

See, the big mistake people try to do one edge, one rose with one strip.

I cut it here and I do a second strip.

That makes it munch easier.

And moving your knife like this make it nicer too.

So I have the second strip.

Now on the first one, the one that you have the piece cut that become a base, you twirl it here to do a center mixture and that hold very nice on top of it here, right.

And now on top of this, you can roll that into a tight scroll.

A tight scroll like this to put it right in the center of it.

And you have a beautiful rose, and that's the way of peeling your tomato anyway.

I can put that right in the center here, whoop.

And here is our decoration, which looks stunning this way.

I love to surprise people, you know, and do a dinner for $10, or $5, or even $3.

I mean, you can always do things.

Economy in the kitchen, that's where you see the quality of a good chef for me.

You have to be flexible at the market, you know.

You may think that you wanna do a leg of lamb with artichokes and you go to the market, and you come back with a duck and broccoli because it's on sale.

Look in the market.

Take advantage of everything.

And be adventurous, you know, in taste.

I mean, look at the squid we have today.

It's beautiful, a bit crunchy.

If you never had squid, you know, especially on the watercress salad, a bit acid, you know, with the watercress.

If you don't wanna buy watercress too expensive, put another salad and then, of course, use the roast of pork that we have.

Remember that it was totally clean.

It's very important because people think that you cannot really eat pork, but if you do clean up that pork properly, it doesn't have more cholesterol or fat, actually, than chicken.

Of course, the pommes paillasson, our cake of potato goes well with it.

We have a salad with that, already have a salad with our menu.

And that very delicious dessert that we have, which is very easy to do.

Take a few minutes and look great.

In addition to that, remember, we have an extra bonus made with the stem of the watercress, and we did the watercress soup.

And that is, you know, the indication of a good chef to do that.

Whether you do it when you need it, or you freeze it and use it later.

With our menu today, we're going to have a Cabernet, and, again, an inexpensive Cabernet from Australia.

A very strong berry tasting, and very-well balanced Cabernet Sauvignon from Australia.

Terrific buy.

There is great buy from Chile also.

Try, be adventurous, look for a good buy at the market.

And cook a great meal for your family.

I'm sure you're going to enjoy it.

I enjoy very much making it for you.

Happy cooking.