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Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet Foods, Ingredients & Fine
Wines
Eat In Guide’s Outstanding Outlet Award Winner from 2006 to 2010
Trees
and Vineyards under a winter sky at Durbanville Hills
Noses to the grindstone Like most of you, we are working very hard
at the moment and have not had much time for ‘pleasure’ or even much time to
spend with our mates. The wintry weather does nothing to encourage one to go
out to eat and this is so damaging to the hospitality industry. We do try to go
and sample some of the current winter specials and soon we will be spending
some time in Franschhoek to try and cover some of the restaurants and wine
farms there. We will be going there to celebrate Bastille weekend on Sunday the
17th of July (it starts on Saturday 16th) and the are staying over
on Sunday and Monday nights which will give us two full days to ‘do’ Franschhoek – you will read about our
experiences the following week.
LONG BEACH MALL MARKET This popular market Is coming back and we
plan to be there with our full range of products. The market is due to start
tomorrow 1st of July and we hope to be there from Friday the 15th
of July.
LOTS AND LOTS OF NEW AND EXCITING STOCK
IN, mostly
from France. We have jars of Cassoulet, Garbure, Cabbage stuffed with Duck
Confit, Duck Basquaise, Beans cooked in Duck Fat, and tins of Madeira sauce,
Cepe Sauce, Green Pepper Sauce plus more Duck Rillette, Duck Mousse with Foie,
and lots and lots of jars of pates, some now in smaller sizes so you can sample
them before buying the larger versions, or buy a selection. We also have the
normal Duck and Goose Fat and tins of Duck Confit. AND we finally have tins of
whole chestnuts, large jars of the Sweet Vanilla Chestnut puree and more of the
superb 70% dark Belgian Chocolate callets from Callebaut. Check our updated product list HERE. You will, of course, need to be
online, but the stock only arrived this afternoon, so please give us a few
hours to update our list.
Saving time and effort and money On Sunday this week, Lynne made a very
straightforward roast chicken, cooked in a bag with lots of herbs and garlic,
and served it with boiled new potatoes, lots of good white wine and chicken
stock gravy and lots and lots of vegetables. Putting this together takes a very
little time and produces a lovely Sunday dinner. But we only ate half the chicken.
On Monday she took out a roll of flaky pastry from the freezer – we always keep
some’ in case’ and fried up some onion, celery and garlic, added frozen peas,
the remains of the chicken, potatoes and the vegetables cut into bite sized
pieces, moistened the mixture with the rest of the gravy and made a chicken pie
which has fed us for one meal with another two meal portions waiting in the
freezer for another time. That means one chicken went into four meals and, if
she had had the time, she could have made some chicken soup with the
carcass.
Our recipe this week is one
more way to use left-over cooked chicken, chic enough to serve to your friends.
Serves four. Use a standard cup measure. We sell a very good Ras al Hanout
spice mixture for R15.
Moroccan Chicken Tagine
2 T olive oil - 1
onion, chopped – 2 cloves garlic, crushed –
2 t Ras el Hanout spice mix - 1 tin chickpeas – 2 cups of diced
butternut – 2 cups of diced courgettes -
2 parsnips, sliced – 8 to 10 baby potatoes – a can of chopped tomatoes– 1 cup
chicken stock – ¼ cup of dried apricots
– ¼ cup of green, pipped or stuffed
olives – 2 or 3 cups of skinless cooked chicken, cut into bite sized pieces – ¼
cup of almonds – one preserved lemon cut into small slices
Fry the onion in the oil till
soft and taking on colour, add the garlic and the Ras
el Hanout and fry for a further 2 to 3 minutes. Add the chickpeas, butternut, courgettes,
parsnips, potatoes, tomatoes and stock and cook for 20 minutes or until the
potatoes are soft. Add the rest of the
ingredients and warm through well. Serve
with cous cous or rice.
Cathy’s Wine Course Comes to the
Winelands!! For the last eight years, Cathy Marston has
been running her hugely popular Wine Courses, turning wine novices into wine
lovers and setting them on the path to enjoyable, informed drinking. Starting
at The Nose Restaurant & Wine Bar, these courses have introduced more than
1,000 people to new wines, new winemakers, different wine experiences and –
above all – given them confidence in their own tasting abilities and with the
wine industry as a whole. Cathy studied for her Diploma at the Wine &
Spirit Education Trust in London and is a passionate believer in making wine
accessible, understandable and fun. Her courses cater for absolute beginners
and seasoned wine-lovers alike, offering everyone the chance to try something
new, ask questions and simply enjoy wine. If you’d like to learn more details
about the hugely enjoyable courses run by this lovely lady, they are available
in our Events pages.
Dombeya tasting and dinner at the The
Square. Monday afternoon found
us at The Square restaurant at the Vineyard
Hotel in Newlands, where we
joined the Executive Chef JB Louw, restaurant manager David Wibberley, Dombeya
and Haskell winemaker Rianie Strydom and a few others to discuss the food which
will be served at the Dombeya dinner on 5th
August and the wines which will match the dishes. We won’t say more about
it here, because we don’t want to pre-empt the event, but the ideas discussed
were exciting. Rianie had just returned from her visit to Vinexpo in Bordeaux
and we were very interested to hear her impressions of this vast exposition and
her visit to Ch. Cheval Blanc and other wine estates in Bordeaux. Her wines
will be served at the royal wedding in Monaco and she will be a guest at the
wedding. We are looking forward to the dinner and hope to see some of you
there.
Last Friday evening, we were guests at Mark Bilton’s pirate
party at Bilton Estate in Stellenbosch. Mark Bilton was celebrating his
birthday and the launch of the new release of his entry level Matt Black red
and white wines. Everyone there had made a real effort with their costumes and
there was a large and happy band of buccaneers in the cellar which had been
decorated with skeletons, skulls, treasure chests and other appropriate
paraphernalia. We took some pictures.
Our market activities This week, you will find us at The Place at
Cavendish (Woolworths underground entrance to Cavendish Square) on Friday 1st
July, from 10h00 to 17h00, where we will have our great selection of delicious
treats and ingredients for you. We will be at the Old Biscuit Mill’s
Neighbourgoods Market, as always, on Saturday between 9am and 2pm. Next
Wednesday, we will be back at the Dean St Arcade in Newlands from 09h30 to 14h30.
Good food and wine continues to grow as a focal point
for many people in the Western Cape and, to an extent, in other parts of the
country. As a result, our list of Interesting Food and Wine Events has grown so much that it was making MENU
too long for some of our readers. So we’ve taken it online. Click here to access it. You
will need to be connected to the internet.
Our
list of
Winter restaurant special offers
continues to grow. Click here to access it.
These 2011 Winter Specials have been sent to us by the restaurants or
their PR agencies. We have not personally tried all of them and their listing
here should not always be taken as a recommendation from ourselves. When we
have tried it, we’ve put in our observations. We have cut out the flowery
adjectives etc. we’ve been sent, to give you the essentials. Click on the name
to access the relevant website. All communication should be with the individual
restaurants.
30th June 2011
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
New 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 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 Computer Associates® and Avast! ®
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at least daily and our system is scanned continually for viruses.
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