Thursday, April 26, 2012

19 April 12 Main Ingredient’s MENU - Wine tastings, Kleine Zalze at the Winchester, Spinach & Ricotta Gnocchi Verdi, Taste of Cape Town, Products, Our market activities, Wine courses, Events and Restaurants

MENU
Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet Foods, Ingredients & Fine Wines
Eat In Guide’s Outstanding Outlet Award Winner from 2006 to 2010
Click on underlined and Bold words to open links to pictures, blogs, websites or more information
A different kind of bird: A Bell Huey collecting water to fight a fire on Signal Hill
In this week’s MENU:
*     Products
*     Our market activities
*     Wine tastings: TVM, Ultra
*     Kleine Zalze pairing dinner , Harveys at the Winchester
*     Spinach and Ricotta “Gnocchi Verdi” with Tomato and Parmesan Cream
*     Taste of Cape Town
*     Wine courses, Events and Restaurants
Products     We’ve had a number of requests for Asian, especially Thai products, so we’ve brought back a few which had disappeared from our product list, Tamarind paste in a jar, Sambal Oelek, Shrimp paste and a different sweet soy sauce (Ketjap manis for Indonesian fans). For those and any other products you need, you can access our product list and see pictures in our website. If you can’t find what you need, let us know and we will try to find it for you. Until our online shop is ready, drop us an email and we will help you. We are very happy to see that traffic on our website is increasing and more orders are coming from it.
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 website. We can send your requirements to you anywhere in South Africa.
Our market activities    We will be at the Old Biscuit Mill’s brilliant, exciting and atmospheric Neighbourgoods Market, as always, this Saturday and every Saturday between 09h00 and 14h00 , and we will be back at Long Beach Mall on Friday 27th April from 09h00 to 16h00, for our South Peninsula friends.
Tracy van Maaren Tasting    A good trade wine tasting at Auslese in Hope Street yesterday (pictures here) of wines distributed by Tracy van Maaren. Auslese is the tasting venue of Harold Bresselschmidt’s nearby Aubergine Restaurant. Harold had done two food pairings for wine on each table, see the blog for pictures and details. We started with Pol Roger bubbly, a rather lightweight Chablis and a Bourgogne Pinot Noir that didn’t shine as much as the local ones on show. Then on to taste John Loubser’s own 2009 Silverthorn The Green Man, lean mean, crisp and interesting MCC and his NV The Genie Brut Rosé, made from Shiraz. (John is the Cellarmaster at Steenberg). Kleine Zalze had three wines, all of which cried out for food and, serendipitously, we have had them matched with food today at the Winchester Mansions – see below. Their wonderful Vineyard Selection 2011 Chenin is rich and complex and many layered. Their classic 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon should be used as the benchmark for teaching students what a Cabernet grape should taste like when made into wine, as it is a very true expression of what the grape can do. Their Family Reserve Sauvignon Blanc made from Elim, Stanford and other bought in grapes is really lovely and shows no influences of hot climate sauvignon. Vin’s D’Orrance 2011 Simply White (Chenin Viognier) and 2010 Simply Red (Cab Franc, Cab, Malbec, Petit Verdot, Merlot, were interesting, but more interesting was the 2008 Cuvée Ameena Shiraz which was sophisticated, soft and ready to drink now. The Raats Family wines blew us away, starting with the many layered very elegant 2009 Chenin Blanc, which goes off in the mouth like a firecracker and then cries “NOW EAT!”. The Red Jasper 2010 has fruit flavours jam-packed into the bottle and ends with a lovely long salty licorice. Then came the long and lean Dolomite Cabernet Franc 2010, with incredibly intense flavours of hot cassis and more salty licorice. The flagship Mvemve Raats 2009 De Compostella, this year mainly Cabernet Franc, with Petit Verdot, Merlot, Malbec and Cabernet sauvignon, has had enormous accolades and the previous vintage was awarded 96 points by Neil Martin for the Wine Advocate and was Robert Parker’s highest scoring South African wine in November 2011. It has a very sophisticated nose, is already soft and ready to drink but filled with class, fruit, acids, tannins and we think will definitely be one worth adding to your cellar for future happiness.
Vriesenhof showed their smoky green leaf 2011 Chardonnay which has layers and layers of good fruit and then a surprising end with flavours of vanilla ice cream. Absolutely delicious and just the style we should be making. Their Pinot Noir is full of berry fruits on the nose and palate, lots of alcohol and then finishes with echoes of those long fruit flavours. The Pinotage is one for Pinotage fans, showing typical Pinot noir strawberry fruit with a rich, rounded, toasty vanilla base.
Why do we leave the best till last and then find she has already run out of wine? Next year we will be sure to taste first. Luckily Cathy Marshall managed to find us another bottle of her Pinot Noir, so we were able to enjoy a final tasting of this notable Pinot Noir and her very approachable Amatra Merlot 2011 soft and sweet Merlot, made for drinking now. It has absolutely no stalky green flavours, or mint or eucalyptus.
Ultra Trade Tasting    Have you wandered into a bottle liquor store like Ultra and seen all the special wines like their Table Bay and Secret Cellar range and wondered what they taste like. We do buy the odd bottle to take home and try and sometimes they are good, and sometimes not. So what a treat to be asked to taste them all, to see what the current wines are like (they do change through the year). Mark Norrish, who runs the wine buying for Ultra, has lately been successful in sourcing some rather good wines and they are being sold at prices from R25 for whites to R54.99 for an MCC. However their source is a huge secret and he will not divulge any clues. Another wine retailer queried whether the farms are being justly rewarded for these wines and one has to point out that, while we are still in a recession, there are an awful lot of farms who simply cannot sell their wines and they need space in their cellars to contain the new wines they have just produced in this year’s harvest, so they might be grateful to move them. There are many good value wines out there if you look. There is a very good imported French range of sparkling wines Veuve de France, which we have been drinking all summer; priced at R34.95 you can pop a bottle at the drop of a hat. The Brut has been our choice up to now but we were very impressed with the Rosé. The Demi-sec might make a very good ‘Champagne’ jelly or cocktail but, while it is not to our taste, it might be yours. There are two white wines in the Table Bay range: a 2010 Chenin and a 2011 Sauvignon blanc, priced at R29.99, a rather bloody and lactic Merlot and a very good classic Cabernet Sauvignon, full of berries, licorice and wild flavours, priced at R32.99. Ultra have three Method Cap Classiques, The Table Bay at R54.99 – crisp and appley; the Secret Cellar MCC Brut which is elegant, but with a little fruity sweetness at R49.99 and the MCC Blanc de Blanc 2007, our favourite with lovely buttered toast nose, crisp golden colour with brisk bubbles – a huge bargain at R49.99. This wine was a Wine Magazine Top 10 finalist. Nice to see if you can work out which one it might be, we have our candidate... We liked the Secret Cellar Merlot 2009 and think that this is a good food wine, possibly still with some age to come, but we absolutely loved the Shiraz Reserve 2007 which is full of fruit, very soft and appealing. These reds sell for R29.99! They also have a 2011 Sauvignon Blanc, full of tinned asparagus at R25.99 and a 2007 Cabernet which we found had a rather bitter end. Finally if you need real French Champagne, try the NV Bonnaire Brut at R169, and the Brut Rosé at R239. They are good, but we do have MCC’s available of at least equal quality. They also have a Don Simon Sangria at 39.99 for 1.5 litres, which might have been great for the summer but Mark suggests you might use this as a base for gluhwein by heating it in the winter. We tasted it mixed with the inexpensive French bubbly and believe it would make a very refreshing sundowner.
Winchester Mansions Gourmet Grapes & Gallery dinners     We were invited today by Nils Hecksher, the General Manager of the Winchester Mansions Hotel to join a pre-tasting and wine pairing lunch with Kleine Zalze wines in their Harvey’s restaurant. This was to assess the menu pairings for their very exciting Grapes, Gourmet and Gallery dinner on Wednesday, June 6th matched with 6 Kleine Zalze wines. These dinners are held every month, prepared by the hotel’s Executive Chef Jochen Riedel, and cost a very reasonable R345 per person for a five course meal with matched wines from that month’s selected winery. They will use the Chenin Blanc as their welcoming wine and follow with the delicious first course of a fresh and warm glass of pea soup with a soft confit Norwegian Salmon served with the Family Reserve Sauvignon Blanc. The next course is Cinnamon smoked (in house) Chicken with poached pears, roasted walnuts, garden leaves and a vanilla blue cheese crème fraiche, served with the 2010 Pinot Noir. If you can get all the flavours on one fork, a superb mouthful. The pears poached in red wine work very well with the cinnamon, the chicken and the wine. Then a perfectly cooked Osso Bucco on a delicious saffron risotto with gremolata, served with the 2009 Cabernet which we so loved at the TVM tasting yesterday. How well this wine complimented the food and vice versa. The soft veal, the aromatic risotto, the deep and delicious jus and the herby garlic gremolata were outstanding with this classic Cabernet. The fourth course is a fillet of pork rolled in rough cumin and black pepper, served with a shallot jus, a Brussels sprout-sized serving of stuffed cabbage and a tiny interesting tartlet of white chocolate and avocado cheesecake in the most buttery short pastry case we have had for a long time, that went ‘poof’ and melted when you bit into it. The jury is out on the sweetness of the white chocolate but some tasting around the table thought it matched the wine well, others (us!) felt it needed a more salty note. The spices and the pork went superbly well with the 2010 Shiraz Mourvedre Viognier 2010. We had a short pause, a spoonful of a lovely lemon lime sorbet to refresh our palates and then it was time for dessert. Surprisingly they served the Gamay Noir Rosé 2011 with the Berry compote Pavlova and what an unexpected, but excellent, match that is. The fruit in the wine clearly complemented the berries in the Pavlova and cuts through the cream and the crisp and melting meringue, which is not too cloyingly sweet. The menu will also include filter coffee or tea to finish and we think this is going to be a wonderful occasion to attend. Get your booking in soon, we think it is going to be very well attended. See here for pictures.
LOW CARB DIET CONTINUES     We have had a look at recipes which we have published previously, to see if there are any that are fairly low in carbohydrates. If you are missing pasta, this is a very good substitution because it looks and tastes like a pasta, but is mainly vegetable and cheese. This recipe contains 1 tablespoon of flour, which equals 5.4 gm of carbohydrate. There are 16 gm of carbs in the tinned tomatoes, so 4 gm per serving. It feeds four people as a starter, so you will get a quarter of that in each serving, not a heavy load. We would encourage you to use the very best quality and freshest ricotta cheese you can find, it so improves the recipe. And please do use real baby spinach, not Swiss chard. Chard works but does not give such light and fluffy gnocchi. The trick as usual, is to handle the gnocchi as little as possible. This is a starter for 4 or a main course for 2 or 3.
Spinach and Ricotta “Gnocchi Verdi” with Tomato and Parmesan Cream
500 gm Spinach – 200 gm fresh ricotta – grating of nutmeg – salt and pepper – 1 egg
45 gm grated Parmesan – 1 T flour
Wash the spinach and cook in salted water till wilted. Drain well & squeeze till absolutely dry, then place in a food processor with the ricotta, seasoning and nutmeg; blend quickly and gently. Softly mix in egg, parmesan and flour. Chill then, using two teaspoons, shape into gnocchi quenelles. Use them immediately or cover with cling film and use within a couple of hours. Keeping them longer will dry them out.
Tomato Sauce: 800g tinned tomatoes – Salt and pepper – 2 cloves garlic, chopped – 100 ml cream
Put all into a pan, bring to the boil and reduce for 10 minutes, then add the cream and blitz with your wand blender. Taste and season. If you must and your tomatoes are not ripe, soften the acidity with a little sugar.
Parmesan Cream: 250ml cream – 150ml finely grated parmesan. Mix together in a jug.
Boil a pot of well salted water, and when it is simmering nicely, gently drop the gnocchi into the water. Remove it as soon as it comes to the surface and drain.
Take small individual serving dishes; ladle 2–3 T of tomato sauce into each. Put in 3 to 5 (depends how large you made them!) gnocchi in each, pour over the same amount of parmesan cream. Grate extra parmesan on top. Put into a preheated 180ºC oven for about 10 minutes until bubbling and the cheese starts to colour. You can cook these in one large casserole dish. You will need to increase the timing but wait until the cheese is bubbling and starting to colour. Serve and eat at once.
HOW TO CONFIT IN CONVECTION OVENS     We succeeded in confiting our salmon fillets in the convection microwave combination oven (ours is an LG) and can report that if you follow the instructions, you too can get it to work. You must have an oven thermometer that can stay in the oven while you are cooking. Look in good Cooks’ shops. Ours cost about R65. We discovered that when the oven was set to 50 degrees the salmon didn’t confit because the actual temperature was not at 50 degrees. Lynne discovered by experimentation that by setting our oven to 90°C, the actual oven temperature registered the perfect 55 degrees. So you will also need to experiment before you put in your salmon. The dish and the oil you cook in must also have reached 55 degrees before you put in the salmon. Then keep to the 14 minutes cooking time that Raymond Blanc recommends, but do watch the fish. Do marinate it before you cook it to get some flavour into it. When it starts to flake, it is ready but it must still look as though it is uncooked. We did not need as much oil as we used, we almost covered the fillets, so we think you could use a lot less and just generously coat the fish. Good luck. In theory this should also apply to meat, but there could be issues with heat and microbes so do go very carefully. We think it is a step too far.
Taste of Cape Town is an event which foodies in this part of the world look forward to every year. This year, it will take place in the venue which was so successful last year, next to the Stadium in Green Point. In earlier years, Taste of Cape Town was on school sports fields, in Camps Bay, Tamboerskloof and in Mowbray, all of which had advantages and some disadvantages. Cams Bay had the most wonderful views over the Atlantic, Tamboerskloof was on the upper slopes of Signal Hill, with attendant accessibility and parking problems and Mowbray was a good venue which, somehow, lacked the pizzazz of the previous venues. Green Point, with its Stadium, parks and other amenities is brilliantly situated, with its Fan Walk and access to public transport as well as good parking facilities, so we are very happy to see it return.  Click here to read all about the fun you can have this here and here to get an idea of the fun we had in the last few years. We went this evening; click here to see a selection of photographs. There was a huge crowd, but it never seemed to be too crowded; we had loads of fun and some brilliant food.
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 help you choose an event to visit, click on our list for April and beyond. All the events are listed in date order and we already have exciting events to entertain you right through the year. Click here to access the list. You will need to be connected to the internet.
We have had a lot of enquiries from people who want to learn more about wine. Cathy Marston and The Cape Wine Academy both run courses, some very serious and others more geared to fun. You can see details here.
Some restaurants have responded to our request for an update of their special offers and we have, therefore, updated our list of restaurant special offers. Click here to access it. These 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. If they don’t update us, we can’t be responsible for any inaccuracies in the list. When we have tried it, we’ve put in our observations. We have cut out the flowery adjectives etc. that so many have sent, to give you the essentials. Click on the name to access the relevant website. All communication should be with the individual restaurants.
Summer time is picnic time and several wine farms offer picnic facilities. We have put together a list of wine farms who can provide you with a picnic, We haven’t put in much detail, just where it is, phone number, email address and a link to the website. The latter is where you will find all the important information. Go and check it out.







19th April 2012

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 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 daily and our system is scanned continually for viruses.
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 Avast! ® Anti-Virus software is updated at least daily and our system is scanned continually for viruses.
This electronic journal has been sent to you because you have personally subscribed to it or because someone you know has asked us to send it to you or forwarded it to you themselves. Addresses given to us will not be divulged to any person or organisation. We collect them only for our own promotional purposes and keep our mailing list strictly confidential. If you wish to be added to our mailing list, please click here to send us a message and if you wish to be removed from our mailing list, please click here to send us a message.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Bento box dinner at Nobu in the One&Only

What is a Bento box? It is a beautiful Japanese lacquered box, traditionally packed with food delights for a single person to be taken to work or school. Now you too can try one at Nobu, who have two on offer for lunch and dinner for the winter season.
Ushered into the restaurant by the traditional shout “Ira-shai-ma-se”, “Welcome to our home” in Japanese, our delightful Kenyan waitress Mercy showed us to our table. Then came Keith, the sommelier, who we had met last week at Tracy Van Maaren’s trade tasting. Much study of the wine list had left us feeling rather winded as the prices are certainly some of the highest we have seen in the Cape. He persuaded us to have a bottle of Kleine Zalze Chenin Blanc, which he said would be (and it was) a very good match with our Bento boxes.
There is a lovely surprise when they arrive. The two long black lacquered boxes are double storeyed! So each Bento box gives you at least 7 different dishes and in the two boxes they do not duplicate any dish. We suggest you go and order one of each Bento box for two people and share as we did. The standard Bento box costs R275 and the Deluxe is R375. Both include dessert.
What is in the boxes? Salmon Sashimi salad with jalapeno sauce in one box and Seared Tuna salad with a mustard dressing in the other. Wonderfully fresh and crisp sautéed baby vegetables with a good dose of chilli. Two different fish Sushi rolls, prawn and tuna nigiri and sashimi fish plus our Nobu favourite, the tempura rock shrimp, which comes with its own dedicated Ponzu dipping sauce. You also get Nobu’s iconic jalapeño dip to go with the tempura white fish in the other box. Beef wing rib anti cucho, off the bone, is sliced and covered in a sauce which tasted of chilli, cumin and tomato; rolled white fish sashimi in a deliciously fragrant citrus and lemongrass sauce and another in the other box that tasted like thinly sliced scallop. The soft roasted aubergine, Nasu, in miso dusted with sesame was also very good. The teriyaki chicken was slightly dry. The rice in the sushi has absolutely perfect pearls of separate rice grains that stick together but are not at all mushy – made by experts.
There are two desserts to choose from.
In another smaller bento box there is a warm squidgy and oozy rich chocolate fondant with a green tea ice cream which we (unwillingly!) shared. Or you can have the Suntory whisky cappuccino dessert, served in a cappuccino cup. You are instructed to be sure to scoop down to the bottom to get all the layers of coffee-flavoured Crème brûlée, whipped cream, whiskey and bits of roasted coffee beans, which we found rather too crunchy. Other than good black coffee, Lynne is not a fan of anything coffee flavoured, but that doesn’t mean this wasn’t a very good dessert indeed.
There is more than enough food for two, so it is good if you are feeling greedy. One of the highlights of the One and Only is they have free valet parking and there is the lovely lounge and cocktail bar where you can pop in for a drink or coffee to meet friends before you eat.



Howard Booysen wines at Van Hunks

We received an invitation to attend this tasting, held at Van Hunks Restaurant in upper Kloof Street. Howard is the sommelier at Aubergine restaurant, but has made his own range of wines from bought in grapes for the last couple of years. On Tuesday, we were able to taste his lower priced range called Pegasus. His 2011 Riesling has lots of charm and is easy drinking with residual sugar of 5gm and 6% acidity with 13% alcohol, with the grapes sourced from Stellenbosch. There is a juicy and soft Cinsault, the rarely used southern Rhône grape, most often used here in blends. These grapes also come from Stellenbosch.
We then tasted his excellent 2010 Kabinette style Riesling with residual sugar at 21gm and good clean acids at 7% and only 12.5% alcohol, quite a feat in this country. This wine which is very Rhine in style was awarded 4.5 stars in Platter and it is well deserved. Howard has just released the 2011 which has an even better sugar to acid balance and is completely delicious. There are turpene hints on these wines but they are only hints; they are refreshing and deep with honey notes under great fruit and crisp acidity and they drink perfectly with food. Howard had laid on some snacks and these wines all highlighted the best in them. He is definitely someone to watch as we expect even more great things from this young man.



Howard with Marile Van Niekerk, who organised the tasting
Howard with his wines

Friday, April 20, 2012

12April12 Main Ingredient’s MENU - Easter weather & food,Taste of Cape Town, Products, Our market activities, Wine courses, Events and Restaurants

MENU
Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet Foods, Ingredients & Fine Wines
Eat In Guide’s Outstanding Outlet Award Winner from 2006 to 2010
Click on underlined and Bold words to open links to pictures, blogs, websites or more information
This Hartlaub’s gull was having a great time catching waves on Hout Bay beach


In this week’s MENU:
     Products
     Our market activities
     Vanilla, leaf gelatin, Valrhona chocolate
     Taste of Cape Town
     Wine courses, Events and Restaurants
Products     We have had numerous enquiries from people who read this newsletter, asking which markets we attend and what products we sell. To make this information, which has always been near the end, more easily accessible, we have moved these paragraphs to the top. New this week is a range of Spanish sherry vinegars, solera aged for four and eight years, in addition to the less expensive sherry vinegars we have stocked before. These are still available, as are the real Spanish paella rice and smoked paprika. For those and any other products you need, you can access our product list and see pictures in our website. If you can’t find what you need, let us know and we will try to find it for you. Until our online shop is ready, drop us an email and we will help you. We are very happy to see that traffic on our website is increasing and more orders are coming from it.
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 website. We can send your requirements to you anywhere in South Africa.
Our market activities    We will be at Long Beach Mall tomorrow, lucky Friday 13th April from 09h00 to 16h00, for our South Peninsula friends, and we will be back at at the Old Biscuit Mill’s brilliant, exciting and atmospheric Neighbourgoods Market, as always, this Saturday and every Saturday between 09h00 and 14h00.
When you live high up on the Atlantic Seaboard, the first North Westerly storm that sweeps in is always ferocious. We normally expect them in May – this time it arrived in early April, on the Easter weekend, and made life rather difficult for us while we were loading our car for market early on Saturday morning. We got soaked! - but not as soaked as the poor runners on the Two Oceans marathon. We measured 52 mm of rain (about 2 inches for those who are still in the 19th century) over 2 days but, as John points out, all of it is very gratefully received because the last year has been very dry and dams are empty everywhere we go.
Despite the heavy rain, the market was full and buzzing and everyone was having a good time. What else can you do on a rainy day but plan and shop for the perfect Easter Sunday family celebration dinner? We were going to have smoked salmon, prawn and avocado parcels and Kleftiko: long- and slow-cooked lamb in oregano. This was to be followed by a surprise dessert for Clare, John’s daughter. But to quote Rabbie Burns: The best laid schemes o' mice an' men, gang aft a-gley, [often go awry]. Clare came down with very bad flu, Lynne woke up on Sunday with a sore throat, a temperature and a cough and we had to cancel the whole thing. Luckily, our other guest understood and had a good lunch. We have postponed till later in the month. Lynne is better, Clare is still struggling. The diet went for a bit of a Burton this Easter, there is far too much comfort eating and temptation with hot cross buns, Easter eggs and big meals but Lynne is back on it and seeing a little difference in that some of her clothes are feeling a bit looser. So she will continue to come up with low carb recipes for MENU. We did have the lamb for supper on Monday. Lynne wanted a merlot with it and John found a 1994 Cordoba merlot in the cellar, which he thought had been there too long, bringing up a 1999 at the same time in case the ’04 was too tired. It surprised us. There was still an abundance of rich, dark cherry fruit, although this had faded a bit when we finished the bottle on Tuesday. Well-made wines, properly stored, can last.
How do you use..? We have had some lovely feedback from customers who are using stock items they have bought from us. The leaf gelatine is so appreciated because it makes such a nice wobbly, gentle jelly and is really easy to use. Lynne wants to experiment with using it to make aspic. Perhaps even a chicken chaud froid – a really retro 1960 Cordon Bleu dish of cold cooked chicken pieces covered in a white sauce, decorated with coloured peppers and bits of truffle and mushroom and then enrobed in aspic. She thinks it is time for this to be updated for special occasions, but with humour and attitude. How about a leg with a truffle exclamation mark on it? And a breast with a question mark?
We have a small amount of the Valrhona 70% dark chocolate pastels left and were wondering whether at this price we should order some more. Well…. one of our really keen and skilled home cooks bought some on Saturday, used 100g to make 5 chocolate fondants (he has got his timing and method down pat) and he reports that they were the absolutely the best fondants he has ever made, and all his guests and his wife agreed with him, despite the cost. Putting this into context what would you pay for a dark chocolate fondant in a top restaurant, R40 or even R60? That means that the chocolate for the five is a bargain at R40.
Another product we are often asked to explain is the whole vanilla pods. Because they are in a glass tube, they are soft and there are at least four, yes four, potential uses for each bean. When using it the first time, scrape the bean seeds out of the bean and use them and the bean in your custard or sauce. Wipe off and replace in the tube. You can use it one more time in another custard. Then you put the bean in a jar of caster sugar and let it infuse the sugar with wonderful flavours and aromas. This will dry it out. You can then throw it into your jam pot when you are making jam or sweets or fudge and it will still be able to add good vanilla flavour. But if this is just too much effort for you, buy a bottle of our Nielsen Massey Vanilla Bean Paste at R195 for a 120 ml bottle. You will get much more use and see the tiny vanilla seeds in everything you cook. About a teaspoon full is equal to one vanilla bean.
We are having some lovely fresh Norwegian salmon tonight that Lynne has had marinating in 2 T Mirin (Japanese rice wine vinegar that has a little sugar added), 1 T fish sauce – 1 T Ponzu soy (it is flavoured with a Japanese citrus) and 1 t sesame seeds. She has discovered that our LG Wavedom Convection Microwave oven will go as low as 50°C so she is going to try to confit the salmon using Raymond Blanc’s method below. He cooks it in 500 ml of olive oil. One piece will not need anything like that amount. We will let you know next week how it went. We don’t have a probe but we do have an oven thermometer. We quote:
“To confit the salmon: preheat the olive oil to 55C: drop in the four pieces of salmon and cook for approximately 16-18 minutes at 45C. Probe temperature of the oil. The aim here is not to cook the salmon but to change its texture and taste. Once you put the 4 fillets into the oil, the oil temperature will drop to approx 45ºC. It must be kept at this temperature, so use a probe to check. The salmon will be uncooked yet creating a very pleasing taste and texture. If over-cooked, the salmon fillet will leak white proteins (albumen).”
We are having this with a stuffed baked sweet potato and a salad. Tomorrow night, we’ll have kidneys, using a favourite recipe and serving them with roasted baby leeks and fennel; the following night, Chicken Sate with a gado-gado salad. Happy low carb eating.
Taste of Cape Town is an event which foodies in this part of the world look forward to every year. This year, it will take place in the venue which was so successful last year, next to the Stadium in Green Point. In earlier years, Taste of Cape Town was on school sports fields, in Camps Bay, Tamboerskloof and in Mowbray, all of which had advantages and some disadvantages. Camps Bay had the most wonderful views over the Atlantic, Tamboerskloof was on the upper slopes of Signal Hill, with attendant accessibility and parking problems and Mowbray was a good venue which, somehow, lacked the pizzazz of the previous venues. Green Point, with its Stadium, parks and other amenities is brilliantly situated, with its Fan Walk and access to public transport as well as good parking facilities, so we are very happy to see it return.  Click here to read all about the fun you can have this here and here to get an idea of the fun we had in the last few years.
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 help you choose an event to visit, click on our list for April and beyond. All the events are listed in date order and we already have exciting events to entertain you right through the year. Click here to access the list. You will need to be connected to the internet.
We have had a lot of enquiries from people who want to learn more about wine. Cathy Marston and The Cape Wine Academy both run courses, some very serious and others more geared to fun. You can see details here.
Some restaurants have responded to our request for an update of their special offers and we have, therefore, updated our list of restaurant special offers. Click here to access it. These 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. If they don’t update us, we can’t be responsible for any inaccuracies in the list. When we have tried it, we’ve put in our observations. We have cut out the flowery adjectives etc. that so many have sent, to give you the essentials. Click on the name to access the relevant website. All communication should be with the individual restaurants.
Summer time is picnic time and several wine farms offer picnic facilities. We have put together a list of wine farms who can provide you with a picnic, We haven’t put in much detail, just where it is, phone number, email address and a link to the website. The latter is where you will find all the important information. Go and check it out.


12th April 2012

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 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 daily and our system is scanned continually for viruses.
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 Avast! ® Anti-Virus software is updated at least daily and our system is scanned continually for viruses.
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