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Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
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In
this week’s MENU:
12 years of
MENU’s
best photographs Elgin Cool Wine and
Country Festival South Africa’s Best
Biltong Maker Graham
Beck Wines and the Wilderness
Foundation Vegetable
Gratin
This week’s Product menu – Argan oil is the flavour of the
month. This wonderful, aromatic oil from Morocco adds a very special, complex
flavour to salads and Moroccan and other North African dishes. As a side
benefit, it is also superb for conditioning skin and hair, which makes it very
popular with beauty therapists and hairdressers. It is very expensive, but, like
so many of the best things in life, it offers huge return for your investment. Have a look at it here and place an order.
If you can find it in the supermarket, we don't
usually stock it, just the products you would struggle to find.... Check our online shop to see more details and prices.
This week’s MENU is not a long one, we have been away and so have
many of you, this is another week disrupted by holidays and our coming exciting
(!) and controversial election and we suspect that your attention might just be
elsewhere.
Lynne decided that it would be a good idea to showcase some of the photographs we have
used in MENU since we started Main Ingredient late in 2002. We have put them into a blog, which you can see here
ELGIN COOL WINE AND COUNTRY FESTIVAL
IS WHERE WE WILL BE THIS SATURDAY Don’t miss the Elgin Cool Wine
and Country Festival on 3rd May when 17 Elgin wineries
will be offering a day filled with fine wines, good food and plenty of
entertainment for the whole family, between 09h30 and 17h00. MORE
We will be staying over for the night and doing more visits on Sunday and
having lunch at South Hill. Hope to see lots of you at this lovely autumn
festival. The weather forecast looks cool but promising.
STELLENBOSCH HILLS IS SEARCHING FOR
SOUTH AFRICA’S BEST BILTONG MAKER Last year, we were taught how to make Droëwors and attended the award
ceremony of the winners of the competition. This year, the award will be for
SA’s best biltong maker and it could just be you... We are dying to find out
just how to make it too.
Stellenbosch Hills is the first cellar in the world
to combine two proudly South African delights with their Biltong & Droëwors
Adventure, to be enjoyed at the cellar door. They recognise that the art of
drying meat is as specialised as the art of winemaking. Their aim was to create
a competition where two of South Africa’s most popular products, wine and
biltong, could be combined.
The Biltong maker of the year competition
has proved to be a huge success since its inception four years ago and, each
year, a different Stellenbosch Hills wine is chosen to be the inspiration for
entrants.
The winner’s biltong must be the best match to the
chosen wine. This year, the selected wine is the Stellenbosch Hills Cabernet
Sauvignon 2011. Entrants can use any meat for their entries and a grand prize
of R15 000 is up for grabs. Judging will take place during September and the
winner will be announced on 13th October. You
do NOT have to be an expert to enter.
Prospective biltong makers can order entry packets
at a cost of R200. This includes a bottle of Stellenbosch Hills Cabernet
Sauvignon 2011 as inspiration, as well as delivery. Participants must register
before or on 1st September. The closing date for entries is 30th September when
500g of biltong from each participant must be delivered at Stellenbosch Hills
for judging. Visit www.stellenbosch-hills.co.za or
phone +27 21 881 3828 for more information
Graham Beck Wines and the
Wilderness Foundation In
November 2013 Graham Beck Wines announced a unique partnership with the
Wilderness Foundation. For every bottle from Graham Beck’s
The Game Reserve range sold globally, a contribution of R3 is made towards the
Wilderness Foundation`s conservation and education programmes throughout
Africa, the benefits of which support biodiversity and cultural, scientific,
economic and spiritual values. Three projects have benefited this year from the
donation of R348 372 from the first quarter proceeds. They are The Forever Wild
Rhino Protection Initiative, Pride Environmental Education Project and The
Rooiberg Breederivier Conservancy. Bravo
Graham Beck. And it
is indeed wine well worth drinking.
This week’s recipe Our deferred Easter
celebration on Sunday (sticking to the Banting diet) took its toll and we were given lots of chocolate
“Easter eggs” which are seriously tempting. However, despite a small helping of
duck fat potatoes with our roast lamb with lots of vegetables and a flourless
chocolate roulade with raspberries, we have managed to stave off any increases
in weight, but no lie, it has been difficult. The starter was a salmon mousse,
served with Nitida Semillon 2011 and Grangehurst’s wonderful 2002 Cabernet
sauvignon was a perfect complement to the lamb. The chocolate roulade with
raspberries was a great finish. Some of us enjoyed Laborie’s Alambic Potstill
brandy with the coffee. See it here
With the need to eat a lot of butter, dairy
and cream Lynne has had to be quite inventive and has come up with an
adaptation of a recipe in The Real Meal Revolution that you might like to try.
The inspiration actually came from gourmand Jeffrey Steingarten’s book “It
must’ve been something I ate”, where he describes in detail how to make the
perfect Gratin Dauphinois. Potatoes are out of our lives (mostly), but Lynne
realised you can prepare layers of vegetables and top them with butter, cream
and cheese. This is what we had for dinner last night with slices of leftover
lamb in gravy. You can vary the vegetables as you like. You could put some
mixed seeds on top for more crunch.
Vegetable
Gratin
300g broccoli – 4 leeks,
washed and sliced – 8 large courgettes, sliced – 500g butternut, peeled and cut
into 1 cm disks – salt and freshly ground black pepper – good grating of nutmeg
- 250 ml cream – 25g butter – 25g parmesan – 35g grated cheddar
Break up the broccoli into small pieces and
slice the thick stem into rounds. Put a layer of this on the bottom of a square
ovenproof dish. Season each layer as you go with salt and pepper. Add a layer
of leek, then courgettes, the butternut and continue layering until the dish is
full. Grate the nutmeg over the vegetables. Pour the cream over the dish and
dot the butter all over the top. Then cover with the grated cheese. Put into a
180°C oven for 35 minutes or until all the vegetables are cooked and you have a
lovely brown crisp coating of cheese. Feeds 4
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 and drives
the wheels that enable us to produce MENU possible. 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. Karen Glanfield has taken over
the UnWined
wine appreciation courses from Cathy. See the details here
Chez Gourmet in Claremont has a programme of cooking classes. A calendar of their classes can be seen 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
30th April 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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