Customer Reviews

Fast Food My Way

5 star:		(52)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

When I approached Jacques Pepin's new book `Fast Food My Way', I was prepared on at least two counts to find fault with the book. But Jacques always comes through with a book I love to read and love to cook. My first prejudice against the book was that `Fast Cooking' is one of the top two or three hot buttons for cookbooks these days, next to low carb cookbooks and entertaining cookbooks. I predict a `Fast Cooking Low Carb Barbecue for Entertaining' book to appear within the next year. And, like so many other authors, it may seem like Jacques is just jumping on the latest bandwagon. The second prejudice I had about the book is the fact that Jacques did an earlier book on quick cooking, `The Short-Cut Cook' published in 1990. I had similar prejudices about that book, but it came through with flying colors, especially since it has been and still is one of my favorite cookbooks.

In a nutshell, this book can become your next go to cookbook because almost all of these recipes are genuinely easy for a modestly experienced cook and they are not only developed by a great master chef, they are the recipes that chef genuinely cooks at home on a regular basis. One also should have no concern that this is a rehash of his earlier book. It is not. There are a lot of similarities in the principles behind the selection of recipes, but that is only to the good. Jacques mixes a selection of the classics like cole slaw and Salad Caprese with unusual recipes such as Parsley and Pumpkin salad and Asian eggplant salad. In the older book, we got Salade Nicoise and hot Potato Salad mixed with potato and smoked bluefish and tangy rice stick salad.

On average, the recipes in the new book are more original and easier to prepare than the recipes in the first volume. In both books, Jacques' recipes follow two trends common to most good fast cooking recipes, similar to what you see Rachael Ray do every day. First, the recipes do require a modest amount of skill and a fairly well equipped kitchen with stuff like a food mill, a mandoline or Japanese slicer, a stick blender, and a food processor. Second, most dishes use foods that cook quickly such as seafood, chicken breast, filets of beef or other lean steak cuts, and veal. All of these things are more expensive than the slower cooking roasts and braising meats.

Jacques is exceptionally fond of smoked, marinated, and fresh fish recipes from the far North and from the Far East. He is very fond of Asian and Latin tastes such as cilantro and tropical fruits. But, all of this is overlaid on a solid grounding of French and Italian techniques such as the braise, the gratin, casseroles, pasta, tomatoes, potatoes, and fresh mushrooms.

The book starts with several pages of menu selections that were the basis of the PBS series shows on which the book is based. This is followed by a goldmine of ideas modestly labeled `More ideas for quick dishes'. This is not a list of general suggestions, it is a collection of 25 mini-recipes, all of which can be done very quickly with very modest skills, and the right ingredients. The remainder of the book follows very traditional lines with chapters on:

Appetizers and first courses (16), covering truly easy recipes with a heavy concentration on fish, beans, cheeses, and ham. The recipes also highlight the fact that Jacques generally likes his food spicy. Be careful with his instructions with the chiles if you have heat impaired eaters.

Soups (7), including some which I would never have believed could be made in such a short time. Here is where your food mill, stick blender, and knife skills will be put to the test. Includes an easy but not too fast recipe for chicken stock.

Eggs (4), with recipes to make this fast food staple much more interesting.

Salads (11), the darling of fast meals. Good salads do take some time, and these are no exception. Includes a good cole slaw and recipe for herbed breadcrumbs.

Vegetables (16), with ragouts, gratins, purees, relishes, sautés, and chutneys. Mostly side dishes from the French and Italian canon.

Rice, potatoes, and pasta (7), the low carb danger zone. Again, a collection of variations on French and Italian standards plus couscous and `Wonton cannelloni'.

Fish and shellfish (15), with lots of stuffing, grilling, glazing, and saucing. While fish cooks very quickly, it always seems like the sauces supplied to spice up the bland flesh always seems to chew up a lot of time. Jacques is unconventional enough to even mix in cheese with his fish. Don't tell Mario!.

Poultry (6), where Jacques does not use up a lot of space on game birds. All but one recipe is for chicken, including an unconventional chicken bouillabaisse.

Meat (10), the high rent district with tenderloins, veal, and lamb chops. It also includes some fast cooking with pork and sausages.

Desserts (30), where Jacques reminds us he is no slouch in the pastry kitchen. Baking and working with chocolate always take longer than similar savory recipes, if only because you have to be more careful in measuring and in your mixing technique, but Jacques keeps things fairly simple by relying heavily on fruit desserts and sweet toppings as in crumbles and streusels. Naturally, there is at least one crepe recipe.

Jacques Pepin is the kind of authority whose recipes can be taken as gospel, so that if they do not come out as expected, the fault is probably with the technique or the ingredients.

I strongly recommend this book as a first source for your everyday cooking. All recipes are easy, few ingredients are uncommon, and all dishes look exceptionally tasty. And, list price is quite reasonable for a very celebrated chef's work.

I began buying cookbooks in the 60's, with Julia Child's first book -- how's that for sheer dumb luck? My kitchen library now consists of hundreds of them, but this is my first review -- that's how impressed I am. I'll skip right to the point now: What have I made that I would recommend (My pet peeve is a review that consists mainly of generalities without the specifics).
The supreme of chicken with balsamic vinegar is ridiculous in its simplicity, yet packs a gustatory wallop! The corn/pea side dish is perfect with it. Just for fun I made the entire "Instantly Delicious" menu -- not as quickly as Jacques does it, but still do-able in a short time, and everything was excellent, although I felt it necessary to "spike" the soup with additional herbs -- a little too bland for my taste. The recipe for broiled lamb chops and spinach is perfection. The chicken bouillabaisse is a great cold-weather dish (although having spent the summer in Aix, it's a far cry from its namesake -- oh well, let's just think apples to oranges -- they're both good.) The chicken breasts with garlic and parsley are worth doing, but I prefer the balsamic version. The halibut on fresh polenta with pepper oil (part of the "Instantly Delicious" menu) was quite good -- found the fresh polenta an eye-opener. And that silly little cubed potatoes with garlic and sage recipe was nothing short of dumbfounding. I'm making the poached tilapia with herbed cream sauce tonight, and if it isn't delectable I'll be shocked! I've recently purchased "Bouchon", both Union Square books, two Portale's, two of Vongerichten's, four of Michael Chirarello's -- all excellent, but this is the book that I'm having the most fun with!

This man is legend as creative and passionate chef. If you want a good read about a truly respected chef, read his memoir "The Apprentice." It's loaded with fascinating insights into the development of this famous chef. One of the insights of my read of that book was that he slowly has evolved from a classic French chef into an American-French chef.

This shows some of that dynamic: what Pepin says is his normal way of cooking at home. He concurs that his lifestyle is much like ours: hectic and warpspeed. When he and family returns to home, want some exciting food to prepare, not microwave or carryout, but rich, exciting food to prepare and enjoy fast.

One can easily see this resultant recipe collection hits that target dead on! It is truly combo of classic French with American twists and ingreds, using easily obtainable and produceable without exotic techniques, equipment and time.

Feast on such as: Egg and tomato gratin; Shrimpand scallop pillows on boston lettuce (potsticker variation); Supreme of chicken with balsamic vinegar and shallot sauce; Chocolate-raspberry gratin; Pear brown betty.

This wonderful recipe array is presented with great style accented by exceptional photo of Ben Fink. Your zeal for attempting these is heightened by these brilliant, enticing shots.

Add a menu suggester of over twenty along with more ideas for quick dishes, glossary and aid sidebars throughout, make this a most desirable addition to one's cookbook library.

Wow! I can't say enough about this cookbook. Fast food Jacques' way everyday! I picked up the book about two months ago and I've tried about ten of the recipies. They're all just amazing. Extraordinary results with common ingredients. Common-sense wholesome food. My favorites are: sauteed belgian endives (my friends from North Dakota who never knew what an endive was are now endive fans), the navy bean soup with lamb (in another rendition of this we disposed of the end of our christmas ham and it was awsome-canned diced tomatoes and worchestershire sauce make this soup a show stopper), crab cakes with mayonaise-wasabi dipping sauce (wow my friends fell off their chairs when I pulled this baby out of the oven), the instant vegetable soup (unbelievable, a zuchini, an onion, a carrot, a couple of mushrooms, and that last third of the bag salad--and bang! a cheap man's way to heaven!) the slow baked fish (wow daddy! use any fish-we tried petrale sole and it was awesome!!!) Hats off to Jacques! If the true mark of genius is simple elegance, then Jacques is the Einstein of the kitchen. Who needs restaurants--we eat better at home. Salut, Jacques Pepin!

Fast Food My Way
Jacques Pepin

I love Jacques Pepin. I respect Jacques Pepin. I've learned even more cooking technique from him than from Julia Childs. But... Fast Food My Way misses a point about fast cooking - you need to be able to assemble the meal from things that you have on hand, or can quickly pick up on the way home.

For example, the Chicken Bouillabaisse recipe has 25 ingredients. And to be honest, I probably have most of them on hand except for the fennel seeds, herbs de Provence, kielbasa, and Pernod. But 25 ingredients for a quick meal? Really! There's also a fascination with lovely and exceptional ingredients, which, when I'm taking the time to cook a fabulous meal, I might go get. But on a weeknight, am I really going to prepare Salmon tartare on califlower salad? Which has a hardboiled egg garnish? Obviously I should learn to keep hard boiled eggs on hand at all times in case I have to garnish something.

If I view this as another one of Pepin's fine cookbooks, it's a lovely book - interesting recipes, clear instructions, excellent illustrations. But it is isn't about fast cooking.

I picked up this book because a friend recommended it, and because I knew of Pepin as a contemporary of Julia Child, so I figured I couldn't go too far wrong. However (as the editorial review so discerningly mentions) some of the recipe titles and ingredient lists didn't seem promising to a first year cook who was stuck in "reheat takeout/deli food in microwave" mode until recently. and the food photography didn't help in most cases, either - eveyrhing seemed to be taken at an odd angle with a fish-eye lens. So I put FFMW up on a shelf in the back room, figuring that I might someday find it more in line with what I was looking for in a cookbook.

Then I happened on a PBS cable channel rebroadcasting a FFMW episode late one and I tuned in to see Pepin in action. Well, it was a revelation. Pepin was a true class act, and just seeing him in action was a culinary education. He was interesting, informative, modest and witty, and he put a 4 course dinner effortlessly and without fuss. Plus, the dishes he prepared looked fantastic. I watched another episode the next week, and the same thing happened again.

So I went back to my bookshelf, pulled FFMW down, gave it a serious look, and realized (smack palm to forehead) that once I had actually seen Pepin cook (as most purchasers of the book would have), then every thing in it made sense and was quite useful and compelling. The value had always been there.But as a beginning cook (and an American unfamiliar with this style of cooking) I had needed Pepin's "voice" to make it work for me. That's probably my failing, not Pepin's or his editorial staff, but I have to review my experience with the book, not what *should* have been if I were more seasoned in the kitchen.

Since then I have made several dishes from the book (and twice put together an entire menu on my weekend) and I can attest that this is a great culinary resource for people who want to eat well - but who can't deal with MTV style celebrity chefs like Rachel and Giada. I've ordered the two DVDs and am looking forward to seeing more of Mr. Pepin in action.

Excellent recipes with simple ingredients. I gave the book 4 stars instead of 5 because I agree with some of other reviews in that you do need a well-equipped kitchen as well as kitchen skill in order for the food to be "fast food". Therefore, for an amatuer cook like myself, certain recipes WILL take longer, but it is worth the extra time. A lot of the dishes are adaptable so I found I was able to substitute with ingredients that I had in the the fridge. In particular, the chickpea ragout and almond cake with berries are amazing.

I saw the program and after years of making the same traditional laborious recipes (e.g. chicken pot pie), was surprised with fantastic techniques of making marvelous-looking and delicious-tasting dishes in much less time.

On the show you can see him seeming to make a dish according to some measurements while the reality seems to be that some ingredient charms him out of the corner of his eye, and like a magician he creates a dish that is original, beautiful, and once you make it, very tasty. I saw him preparing the salmon on the serving platter in a 200 degree oven, and whipping up a salsa using commercial salsa touched up with a few ingredients which all seemed quite spontaneous. When I happened to make it, I was missing his ingredients but chopped up what I had, which was avocado,mango, and commercial hot sweet Thai chile sauce -- and somehow it seemed to be just what the recipe intended.

Somehow the cooking style of the book makes you want to be as invigorated by the stuff that's just sitting around your kitchen as he is -- the antithesis of The Best Recipe/Cook's Illustrated method where focus seems to be on exacting technique, brand of ingredients, brand of equipment, and consistently perfect results.

Another recipe which my husband loves is a soup which goes against all my sauteing instincts. Make it in 5 minutes. Use a box grater to grate a couple of cups of vegetables (including a whole onion, which probably gives most of the flavor). Then throw this all into boiling water, maybe add some grits, throw in some chopped salad greens. Possibly grate some gruyere over the top when serving. Now this is a way of making soup which seems wrong to me at every turn, and yet it is wholesome and flavorful. and never requires a trip to the grocery store.

In his beginning section, "More ideas for quick dishes", he has all kinds of interesting quick dishes. He has quite a few desserts which are also incredibly simple, and not fussy, which I would consider everyday desserts, suitable for children. One is a graham cracker with a scoop of ricotta plus chopped dried fruit...

Another dish which impresses guests is the salmon tartare on a bed of dressed cauliflower. This is not a quick dish, but you can whip it up without investing in a bunch of unusual ingredients.

This cookbook also inspired me to pot a bunch of herbs into one large pot -- recipes do suggest a lot of these herbs (chives, thyme, tarragon). Their success over this past year is much higher than past attempts - though in the style of the book I haven't fussed over them at all.

Minimal cleanup is also a focus of cooking methods. Some of the main dishes can be prepared all in the same pot (and no sauteing, minimal chopping minimal measuring for some). Seems also to bring cooking back to the purpose of sharing a meal with family and friends.

First off, you just can't top Jacques Pepin- he just makes you comfortable about cooking no matter your skill level. I bought this book after watching his PBS "Fast Food My Way" series. All of the recipes are easy and quick. Many of them can be done with things you already buy most of the time and he often tells you items that can be supplemented. For example, the "Instant Vegetable Soup" (which is awesome) lists one defined recipe but the accompanying description tells you how it can be made into a variety of other, quick soups with things nearly always on-hand, like potatoes, onions, and cheese. The "Tomato Tartare" has become a weekly staple in my home- everyone loves it. "Cilantro-Walnut Cod", "Egg & Tomato Gratin", & "Quick Tenderloin Stew" were easy and turned out fabulously. The "Warm Chocolate Cakes" are the easiest I've ever made. This book isn't a mega-source of recipes but the ones that are in it are quality. I'm just an average home chef and have had a great experience with every recipe I've tried- all were easy and tasty. I only wish I could mince an onion like he does!

Jacques Pépin is a supremely imaginative artist-chef. His new book is full of practical ideas for the moderately experienced home cook. The preparations may not be time consuming, but you need to know your way around in the kitchen. I especially liked "More Ideas for Quick Dishes" in the opening section.
Some of my favourite plates include, smoked trout with horseradish cream, bow-tie pasta with fried eggs, skillet endives, poached tilapia, chicken breasts with garlic and parsley, rhubarb and berry crumble. I wish he had suggested wines to serve with each sample menu, as he does on the public television series.
A major objection, however! The photography by Ben Fink is downright abhorrent. Mr. Fink always uses an extremely shallow dept-of-field, lending the pictures a narrow slice of focused image leaving the rest in a blur -- mannered photography, that's what I'd call it. (Imagine using a fisheye lens for all the photos in a book.) Additionally, the four-color separation is of poor quality, resulting in washed out prints (e.g. page 112). And finally, I wish they would do away with food stylists altogether, who perch a virginal parsley or a lonely crouton on the dish to make the picture "come alive."