I’ll never forget the time I met Jacques Pépin. It was 1989, and I was a student at Manhattan’s French Culinary Institute, where he was the Dean of Special Programs. The full-time, six-month program focused on the basics of French cuisine, including cooking techniques that can be applied to all cuisines.

Flambéing, sautéing, poaching, broiling, grilling, braising, baking—you name it, we learned it! We even used gelatin sheets to make fish consommé as clear as a glass of filtered water.

During daily lessons, we were also instructed in a variety of precise ways to cut vegetables: julienne, batonet, chiffonade, brunoise, and, the most tedious of them all, turning or uniformly cutting vegetables into an oblong barrel shape.

**French Culinary Institute Graduation Day.**

When I met Pépin, he was in his early 50s, a well-established French-born American chef, author, and television personality. At the time, he was the host of the PBS series Everyday Cooking with Jacques Pépin, and, later in his career, he would go on to cook with his dear friend Julia Child on another television show, Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home.

During my time at the French Culinary Institute, Pépin was rarely in the classroom, but I remember one day, he entered the kitchen and began walking around each cooking station, observing what the students were up to. When he arrived at my group of three, we were in the middle of preparing tomatoes to add to a coq au vin. Pépin was appalled at what we were doing, cutting a straight slice off the entire end of the tomato.

“Let me show you the correct way,” he said, as he began removing the core by cutting a tiny circle around the stem with a small paring knife. The most important thing, he told us, was to waste as little of the vegetable as possible.

What did we know? Members of the ready-meal revolution in the US, brought up on Campbell’s Chicken, Soup, Rice-R-Roni and frozen vegetables.

Until we learned better, that is.

Pépin’s lesson has stuck with me for 33 years, and I have become a cook who wastes as little as possible, trying to make use of every part of an ingredient—using leftover chicken bones to make stock, for example, or turning potato skins into crispy chips.

Pépin is still going strong at 86, with daily three to four-minute-long videos posted on YouTube as part of his Jacques Pépin Cooking At Home series. The videos are fun to watch and provide home cooks with simple, beautifully presented and delicious recipes, along with cooking tips and heartwarming anecdotes from a lifetime of cooking.

I’ve prepared Pépin’s Baked Sausage en Papillote dish (video below) a few times, and it couldn’t be easier or tastier. Even the cleanup is simple! However, the most important thing to the dish's success is to use an assortment of good quality sausages. I always go to my local butcher, Hudson and Charles, which sells housemade sausages of all kinds, andouille being a favorite as it adds a hint of smokiness to the dish. You can also adjust the vegetables. Once, I included sliced zucchini and sweet potatoes; both were excellent additions.

This time, I paired the dish with a dry Finger Lakes Riesling, the 2019 Boundary Breaks 239, which made the Wine Spectator Top 100 of 2021. For me, the combination of sausages and Riesling is like milk and cookies: as good as it gets.

As Pépin says at the end of each episode, “Happy Cooking!”