- Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin.

In my family, Sunday dinner is a time for slow-cooked food and relaxing conversation.

Today, we'll start with spaghetti squash.

It's a low-calorie substitute for pasta that I serve with a garlicky tomato sauce.

Leg of lamb braised slowly in a Dutch oven is luxuriously moist and tender.

I serve it as the French do with flageolets, tender white beans.

And individual plum and apricot tartlet are a special Sunday dessert.

In my house, we sometimes skip dinner, but never on Sunday.

"The Leisurely Sunday Dinner", next on "Today's Gourmet".

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Today we're going to do a leisurely Sunday dinner, and what better for a Sunday dinner than a leg of lamb?

Leg of lamb served with flageolets, which is a green bean from France.

I wanna start with that leg of lamb.

I have a whole bone-out leg of lamb here.

Each piece, cut in half, each piece is about three, 3 1/4 pound, and I'll remove that one.

I have enough with this, and show you that by the time I finish cleaning it up of all sinew and fat, I will lose probably a pound, a pound of meat.

So, if you go to the butcher and buy one, whether it's with or without the bone, you know that you remove it, be sure to take that into consideration when you order it, as you know that it's going to lose quite a lot.

Now, the fat of the lamb particularly, as you can see, I open it between the different muscle, here, to get into the sinew and the fat inside.

There is that large lump of fat right here that I'm removing.

This is actually the lump of fat where there is a gland inside that people refer to, that gland, right there.

We remove all of this, a bit, even, of the skin.

It's more skin, silver skin, here, rather than fat, but we still remove it to get it as clean as possible.

Remember, that's very important for us not only in term of calorie also, but frankly, even in term of taste, because the fat of lamb is quite strong and I would rather clean it up completely.

So, I have a solid piece of meat here, and as I say, in the amount that I have here, close to 3/4, 3/4 of a pound to a pound.

So, that piece would be about 2 1/2, 2 1/4, 2 1/2 pound.

I open it a little bit that we can put the seasoning inside.

And the seasoning that I'm going to do here is garlic.

I have cloves of garlic here which I'm going to mash up with anchovy filet.

I have those anchovy filet right there, and maybe two clove of garlic.

I'll crush the garlic.

There.

Add it to the anchovy filet, chop it together.

It's a classic mixture.

Sometime the garlic, certainly.

And with that, I put some herbes de Provence, that mixture of different type of herb from Provence where I even have those tiny lavender flowers in it, and all that will be our mixture inside the lamb.

As I was saying, the garlic is a classic accompaniment to the lamb, and very often, we take little sliver of garlic and just make hole in the meat and put it inside.

So, there, I'm going to spread out that mixture here and there on the meat.

Now, conventionally, salt, freshly ground pepper.

Then, I roll it back together to make it whole.

Conventionally, especially now, people tend to cook their lamb very rare, and it's perfectly fine.

Yet, in that particular one, I decide to do a, whoop!

To do a long braise type of a roast, because it is not, the reason that we're doing it now in nouvelle cuisine, rare lamb, because it's fashionable and so forth is perfectly fine, but braised lamb is still quite very good.

So, what we are doing here is to doing a little tying up, here, which is actually just a loop that you're doing, here.

And that loop, a loop like this, you slide it under it and tying it up.

You can tie chicken like this, you can tie a roast of veal or whatever.

Then you bring it on the other side to do the other side also.

And basically, again, turn it and start at the beginning.

You tie it up together.

Now, we have a beautiful roast, very lean, ready to be cooked.

And that has to roast for 30 minute, and that's what I have here.

I have one which has been roasting all along, 30 minute, and nicely brown all over.

And this is the way I want it to look at that point.

The second step is to put onion into it.

I have a large onion, here.

Cut it into inch or 1/2 inch type of pieces.

And I want close to two cup of onion here, that I roast around.

You can let it, you can let it roast for a couple of minutes.

Then, addition of water.

I have 1/2 cup of water, here, I have 1/2 cup of water, and believe me, by the time I finish cooking it, I'm going to have at least three cup of juice.

And this is what I have here, the cooked lamb.

But while this is cooking and this starting, let me move to the flageolets.

And the flageolets are those green beans which are of green a bit like the lima bean that we do in the US.

And they are classic in France and used in different part of France, but particularly with lamb.

So, be sure to pick up all of the dead little pieces inside, which I've cleaned up before.

I have 1/2 pound of the flageolets here.

And to this, I add chicken stock and water, about three cup of each, three cup all together, rather.

And with this, I put a little bit of salt and I will put onion, leek, carrot, all of those vegetable in there.

You can cut them a bit finer than I'm doing, or in bigger piece.

The leek, the onion, the carrot, all of that goes in there and cook together.

Often, we cut that into a small brunoise, which is a smaller dice, but this will be fine.

And basically, you bring that to a boil.

You start it in cold water as we did here.

You cover it, bring it to a boil and cook it for about an hour, an hour and a half, depending on it.

And this is what I have here.

You wanna finish it with fresh tomato and a little bit of olive oil.

I don't have any fat in it now, so just a little bit of this to finish for the color.

And just the tomato, just heating up is enough.

We have them here, and with that, now, I wanna show you the lamb that I have which is totally cooked, here.

And as you will see, still boiling gently, this has reduced considerably, so we'll remove this here.

And what I wanna show you particularly is the amount of liquid that I get out of it.

Remember, I started only with 1/2 cup of liquid, and look at all of what I have left here.

I'm putting it in there purposely because the reason is all the fat will come to the top, so I can scoop the fat here.

You should have, even though I had a teaspoon of oil to start with, there will be some fat still coming out of the lamb.

So, I remove it here.

The lamb, now.

You wanna cut it.

Remove the string, don't forget to remove the string.

And then, serving it in a type of bourgeois manner, in a large plate like this, on a large platter like this.

You can serve some beans separate.

I have a bit too much beans, here.

Spread them around this way.

Then, slice our lamb, or at least some of the lamb.

This is pretty hot.

I can see the garnish in the center of the anchovy filet and so forth.

And as you can see, this is pretty generous portion.

This is calculated for four, that little roast that we have here.

Then, of course, don't forget to put some of the juice on top.

You have a lot of the onion, there, and the juice on top and around on the beans in the classic way.

And maybe finishing it up with a little bit of green.

I have a little bit of chives, here, should be good on top.

Sprinkle it nicely a bit all over.

And this is our leisurely Sunday dinner.

And now, with our roast of lamb, or to continue or finish our meal, I'm going to show you how to make fruit tartlet.

And the fruit tartlet, here, I'm going to do a very simple dough in a food processor.

I have a really minimal amount of flour, here.

I have 2/3 cup of flour, so it's very minimal, and three tablespoon of butter, a little dash of sugar and a tiny dash of salt.

And you can add, if you want, maybe two teaspoon so of a little bit of oil.

So, it's relatively lean.

And what we wanna do is to process it a little bit and see if it get too crumbly.

As it is crumbly now, not getting together, you add a little bit of water, maybe a tablespoon at the most, probably not even a tablespoon.

What happen is that maybe a dash more.

I may have a tablespoon of water, here.

What happen is that the moisture in the flour is going to be different.

So, sometime you may need more, sometime you may need less.

Sometime you may need no water at all.

I have done dough in New York in full summer when it's very humid where I do a puff paste using a pound of flour and almost a pound of water in it, and at some of the time, six, seven ounce of water.

So, that will change.

Anyway, the dough here would be nice to rest a little bit.

But I wanna show you how to do it, so I'm going to use it right away.

And one of the best way, again, to roll it and to avoid using more flour is to do it in between plastic wrap this way.

It's also the recipe that my wife like the best because I don't dirty the table, I don't dirty the rolling pin, I don't dirty anything at all.

So, it is the best dough, however you want to look at it.

So, we roll this, as you see.

Be sure that when you roll it you will see that the pieces of plastic wrap will tend to go one underneath.

So, get them loose again to be sure that they are not sticking too much.

You can place them back again loose on top of it or look on the other side in the same way.

Then, you can extend it further.

We're doing a very, very thin dough, here.

And here is what happen.

Now, I have that thin dough and we wanna cut tiny tartlet, about that size per person.

And I'll have one here, here, two, and if I put a little piece of dough right here to extend it with my finger, I have three out of that.

And with the trimming, I can do the fourth one easily.

So, what you would wanna do is actually to take it directly like this and put it on your cookie sheet.

Let's see the second one.

Are they doing the same way?

I just wanna show you that I can do four with this.

Two.

And the third one, I will add some of that dough.

See, I have three, here, and the third one, I will add a little bit of that dough, here, that corner there to bring that together.

I don't want to rework it out too much, but just placing it like this.

Again, my plastic wrap.

And that should have my fourth one here, as you can see.

So, I'm not really losing any dough.

Just about one here, you see?

So, then, here is my trimming.

I even have dough left over, so here it is.

So, I have three which have been done here in the same way, as you can see.

Taking that one, putting it there.

And arranging on top, I'm arranging apricot, nice apricot like this.

You do segment of apricot and segment of plum that I have here.

You can vary any type of fruit that you have, of course.

What I try to do is to follow the season.

Try to have your wedge approximately the same size.

And then, you can start doing a pinwheel like this all around.

So, those are tartlet, as opposed to tart.

Tart would be, of course, the large one.

The tartlet are the small, individual one that I do here.

I do them with banana in the winter and sometime with a bit of a sweet dough, so you can vary them basically at will.

Conventionally, also, the tartlet are going to be done with a side, and by doing them with a side, you, of course, use much more dough.

So, the problem that we have, you can take a little piece of extra thing to put on top, here.

The problem that you may have is that it will run on the sheet.

And that's why we put, I know in the recipe we have two tablespoon of sugar, so it's 1/2 tablespoon, teaspoon and a half, then, per tart.

And this is it, you wanna put that in the oven.

Notice that I put that on parchment paper, which is going to help a little bit, hopefully.

And you put them in the oven.

I have some here which has just been finished.

And as you can see, they do run on the tray around.

So, you have to be very careful that now that they are hot, when they are hot, now they come out of the oven.

The caramel is still soft.

This is when you have to take it out.

Don't let that caramel get hard, there, because you're going to have a hard time moving it around.

But now that it's hot, it's better.

Actually, I'm going to change this one.

I like the other one better.

Here it is.

Okay.

You could put that with a little bit of glaze, if you want an apricot glaze, or leave it by itself and maybe decorate it with a tiny sprig of mint.

It's a light, delicious little tartlet.

And now, we wanna move to the first course, and the first course is actually a spaghetti squash with the sauce.

And we're going to start with the sauce.

The sauce is, of course, a tomato sauce, and I'm starting by putting a little bit of olive oil in there, some onion that we're going to put into the sauce.

Always onion, tomato, basil or thyme will go well with it.

I have some herbes de Provence here, that tiny mixture of herb similar to Italian seasoning, but it has a little lavender seed in it.

And then, tomato.

Boy, those onion are strong!

Tomato.

I even have an extra tomato, here.

The tomato, you see, you do it very coarsely, here, very, very coarsely.

Doesn't really matter because we are going to strain it.

In fact, what you could do, you could even put garlic, which I'm going to put, but in a different way.

But you could put a whole head of garlic this way in there, because we are going to strain it anyway.

Then, in addition to that here, a little dash of salt and a bit of water.

So, this is a straight tomato sauce and you don't want to cook it too long.

You want to cook it 15 minute to still get that taste of fresh tomato with it.

And this is what I have here.

I have that fresh tomato with it.

So, what I'm going to do is to strain it, yes, right in there.

I'm putting it in a food mill, as you can see, here.

Why in a food mill?

Well, the reason is that I am actually leaving the skin of the tomato and all that thing.

So, you put it through the food mill.

If you were to take the skin or the seed out of it, then you wouldn't have to do that.

But there, it's one of the best way of doing it.

Very coarsely, you throw everything in a pot, and strain it after.

And in there, I'm going to have the little piece of skin, little piece of skin, seed, that's it.

But a chunky tomato sauce, very natural-looking and very good-tasting.

So, this is going to go in it.

In addition to this, I wanna put garlic in there, a lot of garlic.

But the garlic, I'm going to put it in a different way.

I'm going to roast it first.

And what you do, you take a little piece of aluminum foil, brush it with a bit of oil and cut all head of garlic in half this way to expose the whole head.

And put the whole head flat, directly flat on the cutting side, the cut side of those head of garlic directly on the oil things.

Put it there, you wrap it this way.

I use that for many other things, for certain type of dressing where I want a puree of garlic.

That, you put that in the oven for about 45 minute, 400 degree.

And then, your garlic will be nice and smooth, soft, rather, like it is here.

Sometime it stick a little bit, so watch out.

You can see how brown it is.

See, some of them stick.

Whole head, whole clove of garlic are delicious like this.

So, what we wanna do, we want, actually, to squeeze all of that garlic into our sauce, here.

See, and they will squeeze out of the shell.

So, as I say, it's used for other things.

Sometime with a special cheese, I serve clove of garlic like this.

It's a neat way of doing it.

Or, then, other garnish with all kind of grill fish or grill vegetable.

You want to have all roasted garlic and you press it like that.

You get your puree of garlic.

You know that the garlic done this way is very mild, very mild in taste.

So, that would be part of it.

And with that, we wanna do the spaghetti squash.

I don't know if you ever had spaghetti squash.

It's kind of new.

It was new to me a few years ago.

It's kind of hard, but now we use it regularly at home.

You see, this here is all strand of spaghetti.

Inside of this there is the seed that you do want to remove, and I'm removing the seed, here.

You can use those seed also.

And what we do, brush a little bit of oil on a cookie sheet like that and place this cut side down directly on this.

That's it.

And you wanna put that into the oven.

And that goes in the oven for an hour at the 400 degree, also.

And basically, what you get is this, what I have here.

And I wanna show it to you.

As you can see, now, it's roasted and it's soft, and we can remove the spaghetti out of it.

You see, look at those things.

It look exactly like spaghetti.

Of course, it don't have the calorie of spaghetti, and not the taste, either, but it's a nice, great thing to do.

So, you get your spaghetti out of it.

I get out as much on this side.

And what you wanna do if you do that ahead, you may want to reheat.

One of the best ways to reheat that directly in a microwave oven, or, then, in a conventional oven.

You see, what you would wanna do there is to put a little bit of olive oil, a dash of salt on top of it so that you can separate your strand, separate your strand of spaghetti.

And then you heat it up this way and serve it with our sauces that we're going to have, here.

You may put first a bit of the sauce on your plate, a regular spaghetti sauce that you have there on your plate.

And my fake pasta on top of it, here, as you can see, maybe with a little bit extra sauce on top.

You want a few dribble.

Parmesan cheese, of course, like a regular pasta.

And maybe a little sprig of fresh oregano, make it a bit more Italian.

And with our leisurely Sunday dinner, we're going to start today with those amazing spaghetti squash.

It really look like spaghetti and very fresh and nice.

And we have that roast of lamb which is cooked a long time, braised slowly in the oven for three hours.

And then, with that, our flageolets, those green beans similar, a little bit, to the lima bean that we have here.

Very flavorful, very homey, very comforting and so forth.

Then, a salad, and of course, we'll finish with those little tartlet that we made with apricot and plum today.

And with our dinner, we're going to have a grand cru from Saint-Emilion, which is a Bordeaux wine without any Cabernet Sauvignon.

Most of the Saint-Emilion are made of Cabernet Franc and Merlot.

This one is mostly Merlot.

A very robust, very rich type of wine with plum taste is going to go perfect with the meal that we have today.

I hope you will enjoy that wine during your leisurely dinner for your family, as I have done for you.

Happy cooking!