SOPHIE: I'm lucky today to be visiting
the iconic and beautiful Barossa Valley,
renowned around the world for its food and its wine.
But perhaps its most famous export
is not a food or a wine, but a person -
cook, writer and television presenter Maggie Beer.
And she's invited me to come and check out
her own private vegie patch.
I'm so excited.
Hello, Maggie! Hello, Sophie!
Look at you - hands in the soil! Whenever I can.
Oh, good to see you. Oh, it's lovely to have you here.
Look at this. What a great-looking patch.
Oh, well, it's, um...it's my joy.
I don't do it all on my own, I can tell you,
but it's where I wanna be.
Is that right? More and more.
Until I'm so sore I can't move.
(LAUGHS) The old body is not quite as happy with...
But then I recover very quickly and back out again.
Now, what's this? Miner's lettuce.
Maggie is known for her amazing cooking,
but I'm here today because Maggie is also a passionate gardener,
and here in her amazing home vegie garden
that passion is obvious to see.
Look at all this luscious kale, Maggie.
Well, look, I love kale so much.
And whereas I started with this curly kale, and cavolo nero,
it was when I came to your garden and all these different -
the Russian kale, the pink kale -
and I thought, "I've gotta get my act together.
"I've gotta grow more kale."
And they are different. They are different.
Yeah. They all have different flavours.
Do you want me to cook some kale for you
and convince you it's worth eating?
I use it in my juice but I'd love to know how you cook it.
That would be fabulous. OK.
Well, I might go for the cavolo nero.
The cavolo nero is a shyer bearer in comparison with the other kales.
But it does have... It does have a quite distinctive flavour.
OK, kitchen.
So, what are you doing here, Maggie?
Well, the first thing I need to do is strip the kale.
It's best if you just strip off this back spine.
You don't have to if it's really young.
And that goes to the chooks anyway, and you get beautiful eggs.
Oh, the chooks. So nothing's wasted.
Very well-fed chooks so you get
lovely coloured eggs as well as lovely flavoured eggs.
Beautiful.
And that I'm just going to put on to blanch.
Mm-hm. And how long will you blanch it for?
That's hard. If it's young, probably three minutes.
If it's older leaves, about five.
If you buy it from the supermarket,
it's likely to need a little bit more cooking.
You wanna keep a bit of colour there, but three to five minutes.
Maggie was obviously inspired to get into gardening
by her deep love of fresh produce.
These days, though, she has another inspiration.
She's deeply committed to improving the food offerings
found in aged care homes around Australia.
She's even started a foundation to make sure it happens -
the Maggie Beer Foundation.
And they're doing some truly groundbreaking work.
Now, you're passionate about making sure that
we all get access to quality food, whatever our age.
Absolutely.
For me it's about no longer allowing institutionalised food.
And I've been doing masterclasses for cooks and chefs for five years
because it's an incredibly complex arena,
and there's no specialised training,
and there's no level of training for people to get into food in aged care
because they're not paid, not respected.
And there is so much we have to do
because there's so many people working so hard without support.
We need to give them skills, knowledge, respect and remuneration.
With my foundation, and working with
a lot of other people who are passionate about it too,
is showing what we can do,
and that is about gardens and cooking and respect.
So it's not that complicated, really, is it?
No, it's not.
Because if aged care facilities have a little community vegie plot,
the residents love to be out there playing in it.
Absolutely. But I don't have to tell you.
So often people are left just being looked after,
and that's not the way, yeah.
Well, all my cooking is about what's in season.
Autumn, our quince... We've got a quince orchard.
So I've just chopped those up ready to go.
Now I'm going to toss them off in olive oil.
It's about just giving a little bit of sweetness to the kale
for the kale doubters.
(LAUGHS) Because they seem to be everywhere.
They do - I have heard someone say that the best way to cook kale
is with olive oil and butter
so it slides straight out of the pan and into the compost.
(LAUGHS) That's unfair! (LAUGHS)
You've only just cooked that for a few minutes.
Just a couple of minutes, and I started with some olive oil,
sneaked a bit of butter in, a bit of salt.
And I'm after that colour but I don't want it to overcook.
So the kale, now that it's cooled, I can squeeze out more of the juice.
Really? OK. Yeah.
That's enough. But I've still got good colour.
Let me take that. Just chop it.
OK, now it's ready to go in the pan.
Cooking now. Mmm-hmm.
OK.
Toss it together.
And that's all the cooking it needs. Wow, that's so simple.
But while I'm here, I really want to put a piece of sourdough...
my little Japanese grill.
OK, so there we have it.
A little bit of black pepper right at the last moment.
And this is a shared dish.
Beautiful sourdough. A bit of sourdough.
There's nothing like using the first of the season's oil,
which we had crushed last week,
and it's really peppery and it's at its absolute peak.
And so to calm it down, I'll put some fresh ricotta on.
OK.
Because it is rather robust, to say the least.
And I have pomegranate seeds, or arils,
because pomegranates are in season now.
They are.
But, look, this is just about
having things that are to hand, in season.
Oh, doesn't that look beautiful! And really it's as simple as that.
Mmm.
Mmm-mmm!
See, food to me is so simple.
It's just throwing together great ingredients.
Mmm. You make it look so simple, Maggie.
You make the garden look so simple.
(LAUGHTER)
Well, Maggie, I didn't know what to bring, you know, you,
so I've actually brought you some vegetables.
So these are Egyptian walking onions. Walking onions?
They're bigger than shallots, less fiddly and bigger than shallots,
but they're sort of like a red onion.
But what happens is they send up a flower spike,
and on the top of the flower spike, they have all these little bulbils,
and then the weight of that makes the spike bend over.
BOTH: So that's why they're called 'walking'.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. There you go.
Oh, well, that's a gift. (LAUGHTER)
Couldn't be to a better home. Oh, good!
What a magical day. And what a treasure we have in Maggie Beer.
Here's hoping her work sees more and more healthy, delicious, fresh meals
being served to our deserving older Australians.