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Table Mountain and its
tablecloth from Blouberg beach
In
this week’s MENU:
Christmas dinner Chapman’s
Peak seafood supper Lunch at Jordan Riesling Rocks
Follow
this link to see our Main Ingredient blogs, because to tell our whole
story here would take too much space. Click on Bold words in the text of this edition to open links to pictures, blogs,
pertinent websites or more information.
This week’s Product menu: If you are like us you are
probably cutting back on what you eat after a rather indulgent Christmas and
New Year. We have lots of things in stock that add flavour. Our Raspberry
and herb vinegars are amazing for salads or as marinades and we have lots and lot of unusual spices to add flavour to food.
Rub Za'atar or sumac on chicken or fish. Add five spice powder or grains of
Paradise to lean cuts of meat for the grill. Have a look at our on-line shop and order now.
Wow,
that seemed like a nice long holiday break. We hope you all had a wonderful
Christmas and celebrated the New Year with hope and joy and good company.
This
is going to be just a short MENU this
week to ease us into this wonderful, hopeful 2014. A year that we predict will
be full of change. Next week we will have an extensive report on the Hemel and
Aarde valley.
Christmas dinner John’s daughter Clare joined
us for Christmas dinner and Lynne made the promised Beef Wellington. She
adapted a recipe from the internet to get the timing right and found that for a
completely successful Beef Wellington, you need one essential piece of
equipment: a meat thermometer which, luckily, she possesses. Instructed to cook
a half kilo Wellington at 200°C for 20 minutes, she found that it simply
was not long enough. Even in our fierce gas oven, the pastry had only just
started to cook. It actually took just over an hour to reach the required
internal temperature and was just as we like it, but using cheffy recipe
timings sometimes does not work for your home oven, as they use commercial
ovens. Because mushrooms are not popular in our house, she made a rich chicken
liver and almond paté flavoured with orange liqueur, added some soft tinned
chestnuts, spread this on pancakes and wrapped the seared fillet in those and
then covered with great flaky pastry. Lovely flavours, and we enjoyed it much
more than we would have enjoyed a turkey. She made a Madeira sauce using as its
base one of the authentic French tinned sauces we
sell (we haven’t seen Madeira in this country for years) and we had duck fat
roast potatoes, minty green peas and glazed carrots. We started with a duck rillette and finished
with one of Lynne’s traditional luxury Christmas puddings, all the better or
being a year old and nicely matured. It was flamed with brandy and served with
brandy butter. See the food and the wines we served here
Sadly
we learnt a costly and upsetting thermodynamic lesson. We served the Wellington
on an heirloom Spode meat platter Lynne inherited from her grandmother and it
was on our granite work surface. When we put the hot Wellington onto the cold
dish on an even colder surface, it cracked with a loud bang from end to end. Now
we need a solution to at least prevent it from breaking in half!
This is the time of the year when friends visit us from up-country and overseas
and we take them to some of our favourite places. With friends we visited one
of our favourite seaside places, Dunes pub and restaurant in Hout Bay on New
Year’s day for some calamari and to get some sea air and had a lovely simple
but well cooked meal and the wind helped to brush away the cobwebs of 2013 and
the night before.
Then,
this week, we made another trip to Hout Bay to Chapman’s Peak Hotel and it was
great fun. Sadly, they don’t take bookings, so you need to go early and then
wait in the bar until a table can be made available at this very popular
restaurant filled with locals and people who have spent the day at the beach.
It took us about 45 minutes to get a table and then quite a while to get served
so, if you are impatient, this is not the place for you. Have a beer and chill
out. Our waitress, UCT student Lucia, was tremendously helpful, cheerful and
efficient. We have a British friend, who now lives in Greece, with us and we
thought he would like to try their seafood and the good view. We chose Adi
Badenhorst’s Secateurs Chenin blanc and it was a great complement to the food. Click here to see the photographs.
Yesterday,
John guided a party of ex-pat South Africans, visiting home from Australia, on
a wine tour. They visited Grangehurst, Annandale and Overgaauw before going to
Jordan for a fabulous lunch and a tasting of the Jordan wines. They were a very
happy party, who thoroughly enjoyed the day, the wines and being entertained by
the winemakers. Pics of the lunch can be seen here
Riesling Rocks After a pleasantly quiet start to the year, our
calendar is starting to fill up again. One event this month which will be a
highlight is the annual Riesling Rocks festival at Hartenberg on Saturday,
January 25th. We have not been able to enjoy it properly in the past because we
worked in the market on Saturdays, but this time we will be able to enjoy a
relaxed day at Hartenberg and we look forward to seeing you there.
News
of various Harvest Festivals is coming through thick and fast, so do check
out our Events Calendar for details.
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. 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.
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.
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. Events outside the Western Cape are listed here.
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. A calendar of their classes can be seen here. Pete Ayub, who made 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
10th January 2014
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 online shop 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 and standard 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! ®
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