A national treasure

They say you should never meet your heroes as they will only disappoint. But when I met Maggie Beer at an event at Australia House last week she was everything I imagined her to be; passionate, inspiring, warm, and extremely down to earth. The Agent General for South Australia, Bill Muirhead, introduced her as a national treasure, and a treasure she is.


She was so approachable that I didn’t mind elbowing a few journalists and publishers out of my way to monopolise her in conversation as much as I could. There were many questions I wanted to ask her, (what does she really think of Simon her co-presenter on the ABC’s Cook and the Chef series?, was she offended when he snubbed her singing group's Christmas carol sing-a-long?) but most importantly, how had her career in food developed? She told me about the restaurant she and her husband had run for 15 years- an experience she said nearly killed her because it was so exhausting but, in true Maggie half-glass-full style, said she didn’t regret for a second as it has given her a launching pad for the rest of her career.

I took great comfort in Maggie’s words and in the food I cooked from her book. It doesn’t get much more comforting than chicken pie and baked apples.

By the way, she loves Simon.

Chicken, grape and champagne pie
(serves 4)

40g unsalted butter
3-4 chicken thigh fillets (770g)
2 leeks, white parts only, thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic finely chopped
1 cup champagne
¼ cup plain flour
11/2 cups chicken stock
1 ½ tablespoons finely chopped tarragon
1 ½ tablespoons finely chopped thyme
½ preserved lemon, flesh removed, rind rinsed and finely chopped
2 tablespoons verjuice
1 cup seedless green grapes

Heat butter in large frying pan until nut brown then add a splash of olive oil. Season chicken with salt then sauté in batches until lightly coloured. Remove from pan and set aside.

Add leeks and garlic to pan and cook over low heat for 5 minutes until soft. Increase heat to high, then deglaze pan with champagne and cook over medium heat until wine has reduced by half. Sprinkle in flour and whisk to combine then add stock and bring to simmer. Add chicken, herbs and preserved lemon and combine, then cook 4-5 minutes. Add verjuice and simmer another 2-3 minutes. Remove chicken from heat, then add grapes and leave mixture to cool completely.

Sour cream pastry
250g plain flour
200g chilled unsalted butter
120ml sour cream

Process flour and butter in food processor until it resembles fine bread crumbs. Gradually add two thirds of the sour cream then enough of the remaining sour cream to help pastry come together to form a ball. Refrigerate at least 20 minutes.

Cut in 2 and roll each piece to 3mm thickness. Line pie tin with one piece. Spoon cooled chicken mixture into pie and top with remaining rolled pastry. Brush with lightly beaten egg. Place pie in fridge to chill before baking for 30 minutes in preheated 220 degree oven.

Baked apples
(Recipe below is for 4)

50g unsalted butter
1/3 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons roughly chopped almonds
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
4 clusters dried muscatels
4 granny smith apples
2-4 tablespoons verjuice

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Process butter, sugar, almonds, cinnamon, lemon zest and half muscatels in a food processor until well blended. Transfer to a bowl and stir in remaining muscatels.

Use an apple corer to remove apple cores and create a cavity but don’t push through to base of apples. Use a teaspoon to scoop out any remaining cores and to create a good sized cavity for stuffing. Divide butter mixture between apples then place in baking dish. Pour verjuice over apples then bake 1 hour or until apples are soft. Serve with cream.

Dragged kicking and tweeting into the technolgy age

Two years ago I was one of the 34 people in the world who didn’t have a mobile phone. It was partly a social experiment to see how long I could go without one and partly because I am not that interested (or proficient) in technology.

I’ve come a long way in 2 years. Now I can adjust the settings on my mobile phone, I can blog, I can facebook, I can zip music, I have even stored my mobile phone contacts on a website in case I ever lose my phone. But the frustrating thing about technology for me is that just as I pat myself on the back for having mastered a device or application, something new comes along which seems to change (confuse) everything again.

Enter twitter. A bit like email, but not, a bit like texting, but not, a bit like blogging but not, a bit like instant messaging, but not. So what is it and what is the point? I can’t really tell yet but I have been persuaded to try it out.

About a month ago my technology embracing sister and brother registered Lantana cafe on twitter, printed a sign to display at the café, and sat me down for a lesson:

I can tweet about anything as long as it is less than 140 characters.

Following isn't stalking.

I can follow anyone and anyone can follow me.

If someone does follow me it is polite to thank them and follow them back.

I have to beware of twitter spammers ‘twammers’ who follow everyone. I don’t need to thank them or follow them- in fact I should block twammers so that they can't follow me.

I nodded and promised to try and get excited about twitter.

Since then I have felt the weight of expectation descend on me every time I am alerted via email that ‘x is now following you’ on twitter. I need to justify their decision to follow me. I need to tweet about something.

The only thing that will make me tweet more is if I start identifying as a tweeter and put myself out there in the tweeting community. So on Saturday I took the sign that has been sitting on my desk and stuck it up on the coffee machine for all to see.


right alongside Doonesbury's Roland Hedley who has set the tweeting benchmark high.

Cocktail hour at Lantana

All those thirsty people in Fitzrovia, including me, who don't want to sit on the footpath outside the rammed pubs on a summer evening will be pleased to hear that Lantana is now keeping its doors open until 9pm on Thursday and Fridays for drinks and bar food.




When I said to Megan, our new the sous chef, that I wanted her to create a supper menu for the evenings and suggested small tasting plates with olives, dips and terrines she told me that terrines are her thing. Really? Yes really. Terrines and pyrotechnics. An unusual combination of interests you may be thinking but wait until you taste Megan's terrines, they really are the bomb.

Megan's chicken, mushroom, cranberry and pistachio terrine.

A Busman's holiday

A friend recently said to me that he hoped my time off over the Easter weekend wasn’t too much of a busman’s holiday.

It wasn't a phrase I’d heard before but was told it means doing on your days off what you do at work eg. someone who drives a bus for a living spending their holiday travelling somewhere on a bus.

As someone who spends their working day with food, cooking on my days off might seem like a busman’s holiday, but for me it feels like a real holiday. Since I've opened the café, I very rarely have time to cook any more so when I do, I get very excited. I bet bus drivers get excited about going on bus trips too.

Thought I’d share a few snaps from the holiday album.

Fish pie
Serves 4

800g mixture of skinless white fish fillet, skinless smoked haddock fillet, skinless salmon fillet
500ml milk
good dash of white wine
1 onion roughly chopped
4 cloves
2 bay leaves
1 tablespoon English mustard
1 tablespoon Worstershire sauce
small bunch flat leaf parsley
50g butter
50g plain flour
1kg floury potatoes peeled cooked and mashed

Put 500ml of the milk, dash of wine, chopped onion, cloves and bay leaves in a large frypan with the fish. Bring the milk just to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer until fish is just cooked- around 5- 8 mins. Lift the fish onto a plate and strain the milk into a jug to cool. Flake the fish into large pieces.

To make the white sauce, melt the butter in a pan, stir in the flour and cook for 1 min over moderate heat. Gradually add the poaching liquid, stirring well until it has all been added and you have a smooth sauce. Bring to the boil and cook for 10 mins, stirring continually, until it coats the back of a spoon. Remove from the heat, stir in the mustard and Worstershire sauce and season with salt and pepper. Leave to cool.

Gently fold the cooked fish and the parsley into the sauce and spoon into a large pie dish. Mix 50g of butter into mashed potato, season and add enough of the remaining milk so that the mash is quite soft. Spoon mash over top of fish and then grate a bit of parmesan cheese on top.

Bake in 180C oven for 30 minutes until top is golden.

Pear tarte tartin
Serves 8




8 beurre bosc pears
80 grams unsalted butter
150grams brown sugar plus 2 extra tablespoons
juice of 2 limes

Peel, halve and core the pears. Slice pear halves keeping each half connected at the stalk. Melt the butter in a large 28cm non-stick and oven proof fry pan and sprinkle the sugar on top. Place the pear halves (flat side up) on top of the sugar, packing tightly as the fruit will shrink as it cooks. Sprinkle the juice of the limes and the brown sugar over the mixture and cook on low heat until most of the liquid has evaporated and the syrup is deep golden brown. Depending on the ripeness of the pears this can take a couple of hours. Allow to cool.

Roll out the pastry to fit the frypan with a 2cm overhang, and lay the pastry over the cool fruit mixture. Tuck the pastry edges down around the fruit and bake at 220C for 35 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove from the oven and allow to stop bubbling then invert over a large plate.

Duck legs braised in red wine with caramelised eschalots
Serves 4


1/2 onion roughly chopped
1 carrot roughly chopped
1 celery stalk roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic roughly chopped
1 cup red wine (pinot or grenache)
150ml port
zest and juice 2 oranges
2 bay leaves
4 duck legs (attached to thigh)
1 tbls olive oil
1 cup chicken stock
1 tablespoon red currant jelly
8 eschalots peeled
20g unsalted butter
1 tbls caster sugar

Place onion, carrot, celery and garlic in heavy based saucepan with wine, port, orange zest and juice and bay leaves. Bring to the biol, then remove from heat and set aside to cool. Pour over duck legs in a bowl and leave in fridge overnight.

Preheat oven to 150C. Drain duck legs. Reserve marinade and vegetables. Pat duck dry. Heat oil in large oven proof frypan- fry legs until golden. Remove duck and drain all but 1 tablespoon of oil from pan.

Place reserved vegetables in fry pan and cook 5-10minutes until golden. Add reserved marinade and stock and bring to the boil. Add duck legs and cover with round piece of baking paper then cover with lid or foil. Place in oven and cook for 2 hours until duck is tender. Remove from pan and strain cooking liquid through a sieve into saucepan. Place liquid over medium heat and simmer until mixture has reduced to a thick sauce. Add redcurrant jelly to taste.
Cook eschalots in saucepan of salted water over medium heat until tender. Drain and pat dry. Heat butter in saucepan, add eschalots and swirl to coat in butter. Sprinkle with sugar and cook 3-5 minutes until golden. Serve with the duck and sweet potato mash.

Rhubarb tart
Serves 8

500g shortcrust pastry
1kg rhubarb
200g caster sugar
250ml creme fraiche
125ml double cream
3 egg yolks

Trim rhubarb, cut across the stalks into 1cm slices. Mix the rhubarb with 150g of the sugar and leave at room temperature for a couple of hours.

Roll out the pastry to 5mm thickness and line a 25cm pie dish or loose bottomed tart tin. Let the surplus pastry hang over the edges. Prick the pastry case with a fork and leave to rest in the fridge or freezer for at least an hour.

Preheat oven to 170C and blind bake the pastry case (line the case with baking paper and fill with uncooked rice, chickpeas etc and bake for 20 minutes. Remove the paper, brush the case with an egg wash and bake a further 5 minutes)

Tip rhubarb into a sieve and let the liquid drain, pressing the rhubarb with your hands to extract as much moisture as possible.

Increase oven to 180C. Trim surplus pastry from edges of tart. Mix remaining filling ingredients together with the remaining 50g of caster sugar. Pile the rhubarb in the cooked tart case and pour in the filling. Bake for 20-25 minutes until the filling is just set.

Frequently asked questions #1. What is the difference between a latte and a flat white?

The answer will depend on who you ask but if you ask me, and customers frequently do, a latte, flat white, café au lait, café con leche, etc etc are essentially the same drink in different languages and on different continents: espresso coffee with hot milk.

The difference really comes down to what they are served in and the person making the coffee. At Lantana, flat whites are served in ceramic cups and lattes in tumbler glasses. Both have two shots of coffee but we make the latte on a shorter double shot (a ristretto) which means flat whites are stronger, and, as the name suggests, are made with less foam than a latte. If you want to get a more technical answer from people who know what they are talking about look at toomuchcoffee.

Tim Dunn (ex proprietor of Pushka in Melbourne and now barista in residence at Lantana) shows the difference between Lantana's lattes



and flat whites

Milestones

Yesterday Lantana turned 6 months old.

In our opening week, someone who had run a couple of restaurants told me that the next 6 months would be the weirdest time of my life.

Although I don’t have first hand knowledge of having a baby, I sense that starting a new business is a bit like being a first time mother. All the books you read and the advice you receive can’t prepare you for the actual experience of the birth and the first few months of their life; the emotional highs and lows, the physical exhaustion, the heightened sensitivity to any criticism or suggestion that you are doing things wrong or are a bad mother, the reluctance to leave your baby in anyone else’s care and the remnants of food and milk that you constantly find on your clothes.

Looking at Lantana on Saturday morning, I felt incredibly pleased and relieved that we have reached a milestone and survived the first six months.


The cafe is a living, breathing reality which no longer has the fragility and vulnerability of a new born, and I have much more confidence in what I am doing.

Now I need to find that man again to ask him, what happens after 6 months?

According to this parenting guide, "separation and stranger anxiety may begin". Begin?

Loyalty has its rewards

For six months I have resisted doing a ‘loyalty card’ because it felt too gimmicky. My argument has been that people will keep returning to Lantana if we do what we do well. I am loyal to cafes that I like and won’t keep going to a place that serves crap coffee just because they stamp a little card and promise to give me some of their crap coffee for free on my tenth visit.

But I realise that loyalty cards are also a way to say thankyou to the customers who walk past all the other places serving takeaway coffee and return to Lantana because they like what we do.

So here it is, the Lantana stamp book: a collectors item.

Every time you buy a hot drink to takeaway, you can collect a stamp. The more stamps you collect, the better the reward.

Collect 8 stamps for a takeaway coffee


Collect 12 stamps for a glass of prosecco

Collect 16 stamps for an eat-in breakfast of your choice.

Corn fritters with crispy bacon, slow roast tomatoes, rocket and aioli

Our first loyalty card recipient is already halfway to a free coffee- doing the office coffee run also has its rewards.