With Chef Pepin, throwing it all together

Jacques Pepin sits in the back of a car outside a supermarket, holding a bag of groceries he has just shopped for, and confesses to having absolutely no idea what he'll do with its contents.

But here's the difference between you, me and Pepin: He doesn't need to know. Not yet, anyway. He has 15 or 20 minutes before he'll unload in the kitchen, sharpen his knives, and start shredding cabbage and peeling apples. Then and only then, once his hands are involved, it'll come to him.

"This is how I cook on the weekdays," says Pepin, 72. "Yes, I sometimes take the weekend and make something ambitious, but most days I go to the market, I see what looks good, I buy things, I come home and I cook. That's it."

For Pepin, you see, there are no do-overs, no second takes. Whether it's on the set of his new public television show (

More Fast Food My Way

), in his home kitchen in Connecticut, or in a cooking session at the end of a long book tour, it's start to finish, in a flash. No second-guessing, no turning back. And he rarely makes the same thing twice.

You get the feeling that it has always been like that for Pepin, who, in the five decades since he moved to the United States from France, has become one of America's most beloved cooking legends. On his first TV audition in New York in the late 1960s, in fact, he naively arrived unprepared to cook. So right before the camera started rolling, he rummaged through a garbage can to cobble together the discards of the tryouts before him. He grabbed some butter and eggs from the fridge, whipped up an omelet and got the job. (The show never aired, and it would be decades before his television career would really take off, leading to famous regular appearances with his daughter, Claudine, and his most famous costar, Julia Child.)

I enlisted him to lead a loosely defined, budget-oriented supermarket shopping trip. As he poked, prodded and sniffed his way through the produce, seafood, meat, dairy and - at long last - wine aisles, Pepin showed the same genial nature and improvisational spirit that his students, colleagues, fans and readers have come to know.

When he arrived in Washington recently, he was sleep-deprived at the end of a 16-city tour for the PBS show and its companion book. He was also desperately missing his wife, Gloria. Despite the fatigue, he displayed a sharp memory for prices. Those tomatoes on the vine? $2.79, "the same price as at the other market." Flanken-style chuck short ribs, at $3.99 a pound, were cheaper: "That's a good price there."

You don't get to cook for three French heads of state without having a discerning eye. Sure enough, Pepin inspects carefully. He looked for the acorn squash (79 cents a pound) that felt heaviest for its size, and he squeezed browning artichokes in a day-old bin before deciding they weren't worth buying, even for less than a dollar. His frugality at one point bordered on the mischievous: He peeled off the outer, wilted and slightly rusty leaves of a huge savoy cabbage (49 cents a pound), tossed them aside, and took the pristine rest of the vegetable. "We'll let them have the garbage back," he said with a sly grin.

In one purposeful stroll around the periphery of the store, he was not only picking through kielbasa and mussels but also good-naturedly handling the polite interruptions of fans. "I started cooking because of watching you instead of cartoons on Saturday morning," gushed Sammy Steward, 38, a chef-turned-filmmaker.

"Well, now I feel responsible," Pepin shot back.

At the cash register, the total came to less than $24, including wine: the makings, in Pepin's hands, of a huge meal and then some.

It all came together in less than 45 minutes. And I didn't even ask him to go quickly.

Fast food Pepin's way entails some of the most astonishing knife skills I've witnessed in person: His hands are quicker than any Cuisinart.

He jumped into prepping Golden Delicious apples with a simple combination of butter, sugar, lemon peel and water. While the apples were baking, he minced and smashed garlic cloves into a paste, then shredded about a third of the savoy cabbage and tossed it with a garlicky Dijon dressing.

Half of the package of kielbasa went into a pan with oil and was paired with the other two-thirds of the cabbage for a quick saute. He peeled and cut up the acorn squash and cooked it until tender in a covered pan with water, then added vinegar and honey to give it a sweet-and-sour glaze. He pan-fried the short ribs, then cut store-bought naan into strips the size of the ribs. He washed baby bella mushrooms ("Do it right before you use them, and don't let them sit in the water"), then blurred them into perfect julienne. He sauteed them with Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi sauvignon blanc ($4.50 a bottle), poured from his glass.

The dishes, five of them, came out one after the other, and Pepin hardly broke a sweat. He sprinkled the squash and cabbage dishes with garnishes of parsley or carrot, spooned dollops of sour cream onto the apples, and constructed open-face sandwiches out of the naan, short ribs and mushroom mixture.

He probably would have done it in half the time if I hadn't kept interrupting with questions about techniques and amounts. But even that was a breeze. When he would take a big pinch of salt with his fingers, he'd drop it into a teaspoon measure, where it would level out. Exactly. Every time.

We ended up with a hearty, rib-sticking seasonal meal for six, plus a bonus dish, plus some leftover sausage and butter. The slaw's dressing was addictively pungent, the baked apples were custardy and perfumed with lemon, the kielbasa had crisp edges, the cabbage with them was almost caramelized, the squash was beautifully browned and a little tangy, and the tender short ribs were, well, a revelation. I'd never had them any way but slow-cooked.

"Neither have I," Pepin replied as he cut them into pieces between the bones and grabbed forkfuls of the meat, juice-soaked naan, and mushrooms. "Not bad."

Not bad. Especially considering that this was a man working on a few hours' sleep, eager to get back to his hotel to rest up for a program and book-signing at the Smithsonian that night.

What would he have done if he had been brighter-eyed and bushier-tailed?

"Easy," he said. "Six dishes."