Weeknight Pasta Recipe with Jacques Pépin

All you need for a quick and delicious weeknight dinner is some fresh veggies, a bit of shrimp, and plenty of garlic zapped in the microwave then tossed with your favorite pasta. Cook along with Jacques Pépin in his home kitchen, and get inspired for your next meal!
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Hi! I’m Jacques Pépin and I’m cooking at home. [Music] Okay I want to show you a way that I do cooking pasta. Half a pound of pasta, in that case. I’m going and I’m putting in there, salted water. That will take 10 12 minutes depending how you like it. I like it al dente but not to al dente. Al dente often refers to the center of the pasta when you break it there still a white dot which is uncooked dough. I don’t like it that that uh that raw, you know. So, I cook it a little more but I mean it’s purely a question of taste. So what I have here is half a pound of shrimp you know I’m cutting into like coarsely diced. Doesn’t really matter. Okay going get in there I have like scallions here so I will have probably close to half a half a cup of scallions that I’m putting it in there. My pasta is cooking all right. Just put it on 12 minutes here to see. Garlic. I have about a couple of cloves of garlic here. It’s a teaspoon, a teaspoon and a half of garlic. This is all my garnish for the pasta, and I’m going to cook that. I have half a cup of corn here. I have a lot of vegetables. And probably — I may not need all of that onion. But I like – op! I would say a good half a cup of onion. Zucchini. So let’s see here about about half inch slice Zucchini. And that will be probably a good two cup of zucchini here. Course you can change your vegetable according to what you have in your refrigeration — in your refrigerator, which is what I do usually. All right. My pasta has still a way to go. Into this now I’m going to put a good couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Salt and pepper. Pepper. I will add some cheese later on, but we’ll put the cheese later on. Let’s toss that together. Okay. I’m going to put it into the microwave oven, just covering it this way. Okay let’s see this is 11 minutes now. Mm, still a bit al dente, but it’s fine with me. So I’m going to drain it out. This I left 6 minutes, finally, I’m putting two tablespoons of butter in there. And, and the pasta. And, oh maybe, I good half a cup of the the liquid. This is my 12 minutes. There is my pasta now. Probably a quarter of a cup of grated cheese. I have to taste for salt. I mean we have a lot of we have a lot of garnish here in the bottom. I always let it a couple of minutes this way, and uh the Water tends to be absorbed by the pasta. A little more salt, pepper maybe a dash more of olive oil, never hurts. That’s it. And you have the the pasta and you know, I do that for me at night for dinner, and I usually serve just a salad with that. I put a bit of pepper on top of it sometimes I do a vinaigrette, most of the time I do just the salt, pepper, a dash of vinegar. And the vinegar here — no more than maybe a teaspoon. Tablespoon and a half of olive oil. I bring that to the table this way. I never even toss it. I toss it when I eat it. Pasta and a salad, the perfect dinner. Happy cooking! [Music]