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Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet
Foods & Ingredients
Eat
In Guide’s Five time Outstanding Outlet Award Winner
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21 439 3169 / +27 83 229 1172
One of the huge
tortoises in the garden at The Vineyard Hotel enjoying some welcome winter
sunshine
In
this week’s
MENU:
Techno meltdown Mint’s new Menu and modus Coming attractions not to miss Strandveld dinner pre-tasting at The Vineyard Women’s Day at Dunes Vinimark trade tasting Gibson’s burgers Schultz brothers at Aubergine Bottling the first wine from The Vineyard Hot and Sour Soup
To take a look at our Main Ingredient blogs, follow the
link: http://adamastorbacchus.blogspot.com/
because to tell our whole story
here would take too much space and you can also read earlier blogs. Click on Bold words in the
text of this edition to open links to pictures, blogs, pertinent
websites or more information. Follow us on Twitter: @mainingmenu
This week’s Product menu: This week’s recipe is Hot and Sour Soup and we
stock the tamarind paste you will need, plus some other Asian spices and a good
sambal oelek and Tom Yum paste should you be thinking of warmer food in the
cold winter weather.
Buying from us On Line We
have a lot of fun putting MENU together each week and, of course, doing the
things we write about, but making it possible for you to enjoy rare and
wonderful gourmet foods is what drives our business. We stock a good range of ingredients and delicious ready-made gourmet foods
which you are unlikely to find elsewhere in South Africa. You can contact us by
email or phone, or
through our on line shop. We can send your requirements to you anywhere
in South Africa. Please do not pay
until we have confirmed availability and invoiced you, then you pay and then we
deliver or post. When you make
an eft payment, make sure that it says who you are. Use the form on the website
to email us your order. Click here to see our OnLine Shop.
Our market activities Come and visit us at the Old Biscuit Mill’s
wonderfully exciting, atmospheric Neighbourgoods Market, as always, this Saturday and every Saturday between 09h00 and 14h00. Tip: Some visitors
tell us how they struggle to find parking. It’s quite easy if you know how. Click here for a map which shows where we park.
Meltdown There are
some days in your life when it would have been better not to have got out of
bed. Such was last Thursday. There we were both working on MENU when our WiFi went down and we had no
internet and email. It looked like our router was faulty. Then Lynne realized
that her computer had gone too, fried by a loose screen connection we think. So
we spent the morning at MWeb at Canal Walk, bought a new router and got home to
find it didn’t work at all. The fault was much, much more complicated and MWeb
spent the weekend fighting with Telkom about line speed and “faults on the
line”, swapping blame while we got more and more stressed. So sadly we could
not put out an ‘issue’ of Menu as it took five more days to get us back up and
running. But we are back! And here is a very full issue because life and events
do go on. We hope you missed us.
Mint’s new Menu and modus Mint
restaurant at the Taj Hotel in St George’s Mall in town have changed their menu
to a less formal selection and are on a mission to attract more walk-in trade.
They have made the front of the restaurant more approachable and it will be
lovely to sit out in better weather as they now have tables on the Mall. We
were invited to taste some of the new signature dishes on the new menu and we
thought we would be given a small selection of dishes. We were given 10! It
turned into a gargantuan tasting of lovely food. They have moved to a more relaxed, local grill
style, using fresh local ingredients, serving organic and biodynamic wine, and the
selection will be more healthy and environmentally friendly.
In conjunction with their regular menu, they also have
a “Mint Taste Dinner” every first Friday of the month, where they showcase a
three course dinner menu, which includes a glass of wine with each course, at
R295.00. Or, on the same evening, you can eat from the a la carte menu and enjoy a free
wine tasting of the wines being showcased that evening. Click here to see their menu and photographs of what we
ate. One thing we can recommend is their incredibly light
gnocchi in a rich cheese sauce. Reminded us of the late lamented L’Aperitivo!
Coming attractions not
to miss One of our favourite wine tastings will take
place next week on Thursday 22nd at the CTICC: Nedbank Cape Winemakers Guild Auction Showcase where you can taste some
of the many 2013 CWG Auction Wines so do get your tickets from Computicket now.
Sadly, the Shiraz Showcase takes place on the same
evening at the Vineyard which should also be good... But we will be at the CWG,
we can only do one huge tasting a day. Another one for your diary is the Wine
Concepts Sauvignon Festival at the Vineyard on the 30th August where you can
taste current and older vintages of Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon. We
plan to be there too. Webtickets or Wine Concepts for tickets. More details in our Events Calendar.
We were at the Vineyard hotel last week for the pre-tasting of the Strandveld Wines for a wine-paired dinner which will take place on the 23rd
August, which we will attend. Book for this now, the food being prepared is
going to be very good, as are all the wines from Strandveld, which impressed us
very much. Click here to see what we do at a pre-tasting.
Women’s Day saw us take advantage of the
wonderful summery like winter weather we had last week and we sat upstairs at
Dunes and ate a light lunch with draught beer. Lovely views. Click to see it.
Tasting more interesting wines Vinimark /Wineworx held their trade tasting
at the One and Only Hotel on Monday and this was a good opportunity to taste
through their range of wines and chat to the winemakers. We started with some
French champagne and the one we like the most was the crisp, fresh and lively
Ayala.
They do represent a wide range of wines from very
popular and reasonable brands like Wolftrap, Landskroon, Darling Cellars and Flagstone,
to some of the excellent top brands like Glen Carlou, Glenelly and Rustenberg. We
love the new and interesting wines from farms like Edgebaston: try the Berry
Box white and the Pepper Pot or their 2012 Chardonnay which is very French in
style or the delicious 2011 Cabernet Sauvignon, which is a blockbuster of a
wine. Le Riche had the
Cabernet which impressed us so much at Caroline’s and was again our favourite
red of the evening. Altydgedacht charmed us with their green figgy sauvignon
blanc and absolutely wowed us with their Gewürztraminer, full of rose petals
and litchis. Rietvallei has a Special Select Chardonnay 2012 which is golden
and superbly wooded but gentle and full of fruit.
Reyneke’s Reserve Red (60% Shiraz 40% Cabernet) was a
four star stunner. Two more whites that really impressed were Shannon’s
Sanctuary Peak Sauvignon Blanc 2013 with 11% Semillon topping it off with rich
elegance and Warwick’s The White Lady Chardonnay 2011 was very crisp and
elegant and shows huge promise for awards.
Gibson’s When you do
a tasting like this you need to fill up quickly with something substantial and
Lynne had read about the Monday special at Gibson’s in the Waterfront. Two
burgers for the price of the more expensive one. We had good beefy flame-grilled
burgers (great flavour), good crisp chips for John and a baked potato for
Lynne, two Windhoek Light lagers and then it was time for home. The bill was a
very reasonable R130. See the photos here.
Schultz brothers at Aubergine Wednesday
was Lynne’s birthday and, to celebrate, we booked for this very special annual
event . They charged only R495 a head for owner chef Harald Bresselschmidt’s
superb five course meal paired with wines made by the four Schultz brothers
from Hartenberg, Thelema, Sutherland and Kleinood. We had an absolutely
splendid evening, with lots of spoiling – a dessert birthday plate and two
bottles of wine as a gift (and embarrassing singing!) for Lynne. Click here for the photographs of the food, wines and
this glittering occasion.
First wine from The Vineyard, bottled On
Saturday before last, John dropped Lynne to work at the Neighbourgoods Market
and drove to Klein Constantia to participate in the bottling of the first wine
(a sauvignon/Semillon blend) to be made from grapes grown in Newlands in 200
years. The grapes came from the small vineyard on the bank of the Liesbeek
river at the Vineyard Hotel. The first harvest was very small and we bottled
about two cases of wine. Not a commercial quantity by any means, but a start
nevertheless. After the bottling the assembled company went to the little
vineyard to prune the vines (instructed and supervised by Waterford’s Kevin
Arnold). This was followed by an excellent lunch, accompanied by wines from the
wineries who are the mentors of the vineyard, Klein Constantia, Simonsig,
Warwick and Waterford. See the pics here.
Recipe This week’s recipe is something perfect for our current cold, wet and
stormy weather and it doesn’t take a lot of time to make. You can obviously
vary the amount of heat you add and go from a mild glow to a huge kick of
chilli. This version should produce a medium hot soup. There are many different
varieties of this soup in Asia from Szechuan with mushrooms and pepper, to a
Thai Tom Yum Kah but this is another variation.
Hot and Sour Soup
3 dried birds eye chillies – 2.5 cm fresh
peeled ginger root, roughly chopped - 3 peeled cloves of garlic – 1 small sweet
onion or 2 shallots, chopped - 1 t shrimp paste – 1/2 t palm sugar – 2 T
tamarind paste OR 3 T lemon juice
1 litre vegetable or chicken stock – 3 T Thai fish
sauce (nam pla) – 3 oz fresh green beans cut into 3 cm pieces – 2 bok choi
heads or two baby cabbages sliced into 2.5 cm pieces or 50g baby spinach leaves
(washed) – sliced fresh red chilli/s to add heat - 200g peeled prawns or firm fish and/or squid, scallops,
mussels to the same weight - fresh coriander to garnish
Put the first 7 ingredients into a pestle and mortar
or a food processor and work into a coarse paste, adding a little water if
necessary. Bring the stock to a simmer then add the paste to it and cook for 10
minutes. Strain through a muslin or fine sieve. The finer the sieve, the
clearer the soup. Add the beans and the Thai fish sauce to flavour and cook for
a minute. Taste and if it is not hot enough for you, add some fresh red chilli.
Then add the bok choi and cook for another minute. Then finally add the prawns
or the other seafood until they are just cooked – do not overcook. Serve
sprinkled with coriander and a little fresh chilli. You could follow this with some Chinese
dumplings or other dim sum.
There is a huge and rapidly growing
variety of interesting things to occupy your leisure time here in the Western
Cape. There
are so many interesting things to do in our world of food and wine that we have
made separate list for each month for which we have information. To see what’s happening in our world of
food and wine (and a few other cultural events), visit
our Events Calendar. It
needs updating and we’ll do that tomorrow. All the events are listed in date
order and we already have a large number of exciting events to entertain you
right through the year.
Learn about wine and cooking
We receive a lot of enquiries from people who want to learn more about wine. Cathy Marston and The Cape Wine Academy both run wine
education courses, some very serious and others more geared to fun. You can see
details of Cathy’s WSET and other courses here and here and the CWA courses here.
Chez
Gourmet in Claremont has a
programme of cooking classes. We plan to visit their French establishment after
Vinexpo. A calendar of their classes can be seen here.
Pete Ayub, who makes our very popular Prego sauce, runs evening cooking classes at Sense of Taste, his
catering company in Maitland. We can recommend them very highly, having enjoyed
his seafood course. Check
his programme here. Nadège Lepoittevin-Dasse has cooking
classes in Fish Hoek and conducts cooking tours to Normandy. You can see more details here. Emma
Freddi runs the Enrica Rocca cooking courses at her
home in Constantia. Brett Nussey’s Stir Crazy courses are now being
run from Dish Food and Social’s premises in Main Road Observatory (opposite
Groote Schuur hospital). Lynn Angel runs the Kitchen Angel
cooking school and does private dinners at her home. She holds hands-on cooking
classes for small groups on Monday and Wednesday evenings. She trained with
Raymond Blanc, and has been a professional chef for 25 years. More info
here
15th August 2013
Remember - if you can’t find something, we’ll do our
best to get it for you, and, if you’re in Cape Town or elsewhere in the
country, we can send it to you! Check our product list for details and prices.
PS If a word or name is in bold type and underlined,
click on it for more information
Phones:
+27 21 439 3169 / 083 229 1172 / 083 656 4169
Postal
address: 60 Arthurs Rd, Sea Point 8005
Our Adamastor
& Bacchus© tailor-made Wine, Food and Photo tours take small groups (up to 6) to
specialist wine producers who make the best of South Africa’s wines. Have fun
while you learn more about wine and how it is made! Tours can be conducted in
English, German, Norwegian or Dutch flavoured Afrikaans.
Recommendations of products and outside events are not
solicited or charged for, and are made at the
authors’ pleasure. All
photographs, recipes and text used in these newsletters and our blogs are © John & Lynne Ford,
Adamastor & Bacchus. Our restaurant reviews are usually unsolicited. We
prefer to pay for our meals and not be paid in any way by anyone. Whether we
are invited or go independently, we don’t feel bad if we say we didn’t like it.
Honesty is indeed our best policy. While every effort is made to avoid
mistakes, we are human and they do creep in occasionally, for which we
apologise. Our Avast! ® Anti-Virus software is updated at least
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