MENU
Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet
Foods & Ingredients
Eat
In Guide’s Outstanding Outlet Award Winner from 2006 to 2010
+27
21 439 3169 / +27 83 229 1172
South Africa's national flower, a
young Protea cynaroides, the King Protea
In this week’s MENU:
On
Line Shop
This
week’s Product menu
Our
market activities
Holidays
Kirstenbosch
carols
Cees
van Casteren MW dinner at Waterkloof
and a
wonderful Christmas and New Year to all
Wine
and Food Events in 2012 & 2013
Wine
courses & cooking classes
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. We are constantly surprised at
how many of the older blogs are still being read. Google Analytics tells us how
many people are reading them and where they are. There is something special
about seeing that our ramblings are being read in China or South Korea. Readers
in Europe, The UK and North America are a good percentage, but the surprise
always comes from the countries outside our normal reach. Click on underlined and Bold words in the text of this edition to
open links to pictures, blogs, pertinent websites or more information.
Follow us on Twitter: @mainingmenu
Main Ingredient's On Line Shop is performing very
well. We are continuing to update it with new products and with photographs of
products. E had a small glitch when we removed our bank details and this
prevented a few of you from placing an order. We have corrected this, but - Do not pay until we
have confirmed availability and invoiced you. Use the form on the
website to email us your order and we will send you the final invoice. Click
here to see the shop.
This week’s Product menu Christmas treats are the order of the day:
Lynne's puds and cakes, chestnuts, sweet and savoury, patés, mustards and all
sorts of other delicacies. If you want something delicious for your Christmas
dinner without having to spend the day slaving in a hot kitchen, our cans of
confit duck will save you effort and give you a meal to remember. Check them in
our online shop. We have also had orders for other delicacies, which we can
provide frozen to special order, such as frozen croissants (case lots only),
scallops and frogs' legs.
Fresh truffles
are still
available to special order. We need to know your requirement as soon as
possible after you receive this, so that we can quote you and receive your
payment in time to send your order to the supplier. Burgundy is the most
affordable and orders must be in multiples of 50 grams. The truffles will be
airfreighted. We can source white truffles from Alba and black truffles from
Perigord but the price is significantly higher. Send us a
message if you wish to order.
Christmas cometh whatever we may do.... Lynne has
been baking her individual mini Christmas cakes and full-sized Christmas
puddings this week. Send her a message if you’d like to place an order.
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 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.
Cape Point
Vineyards Market in Noordhoek is where we'll be again next Thursday evening,
December 27th. Come and buy some New Year treats, enjoy some of their stunning
wines and have a picnic while you watch the sun go down.
Holidays Well, most of you will have packed it
in at work and are taking a holiday. Because of the way the dates fall, it is
possible that you are taking a lovely long break for only a few days of leave.
But some of us have to work and make money. We see super photos of where you
are on Facebook, walking on beaches, in the mountains, braaiing and eating
enormous crayfish, or dosas in India. We just work. We are envious. It is a
rewarding time of year, being able to supply all our customers with the
luxuries they need for Christmas and New Year and getting paid for doing so.
But we SO need a break away from all this. Lynne is fantasizing about walking
along an empty beach soon. Maybe March.
Our Internet shop is showing
great results and we hope to add lots of new products to it in the New Year.
Luckily the social work events calm down a lot in December so we do find
ourselves with days off with little to do, except work from home. We hope you
have been able to take time off to be with your family and loved ones; that you
will have a great break and a Happy Christmas and New Year or whatever
celebration is appropriate to you and makes you happy. We hope we see lots of
you next year.Carolling in key, but in the dark This week we managed to squeeze in a visit to Kirstenbosch for Carols by Candlelight, an annual event which we love and try not to miss. Sadly, it is now Carols by Glowstick, safer for the little ones we realise, but it has lost a great deal of its charm and atmosphere and the glow sticks do not give that much light, so we found it quite hard to read the hymn sheet without a torch. But we enjoyed a good bellow, a lovely picnic and lots of lovely carols. And the grass is always spotless when everyone leaves, which is impressive. Would that all who go to our coastline could leave it as clean… Click here for some photos
Feasting with Cees van Casteren MW at
Waterkloof On Monday
night we were invited to a function at Waterkloof restaurant in Somerset West.
Cees van Casteren has become the 301st Master of Wine and is only the second
one from the Netherlands. His dissertation was on Chenin and many of the people
in the South African wine industry were invited to answer a questionnaire he
wrote as part of this; and we were two of them. He generously provided a superb
dinner, told us about the Master of Wine examinations, which are extremely
difficult and take several years to complete. He also provided some absolutely
amazing wines from his own cellar and put on two quizzes during the meal. Click
here to see the pictures and what we ate and drank.
We drank local Chenins and other wines with
our dinner and we had one "stand up" quiz, where we all tasted the
same wine blind and then Cees asked us various questions like: “Is the wine you
are tasting local or foreign?” Then all those who thought local had to sit
down. And so it went until there were only two people left standing: Tyrrel
Myburgh and Rijk Melck. They both managed to identify the wine we were all
tasting as a Bordeaux left bank St Julien and, finally, Rijk won by a nose.
During the second quiz each table got a carafe of wine to identify amongst
themselves, and each table had a different wine. Our table managed to come
second. These are great fun quizzes to do with your wine club and we had wine
left over to drink with the food. This week’s Recipe There is no recipe this week, as we are sure you all have had your Christmas meal planned for weeks. If you want to know what to do with the leftovers, watch the Food channels, they seem to have countless ideas this month.
And finally…
There won’t be an
issue of MENU next week or in the
first week of January; we will be taking a tiny rest, but we wish you all a
very, very Happy Christmas and an even better 2013 to come. Drive safely, drink
wisely and well. Above all, have a wonderful time.
Food and wine (and a few other) events for you to enjoyThere 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 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. Click here to access the Calendar. You will need to be connected to the internet. We have a new calendar for 2013. Check it here.
Learn about wine and cooking
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 wine
education courses, some very serious and others more geared to fun. You can see
details here.
Chez Gourmet in Claremont has a programme of cooking
classes. 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.Sadly, refreshing our restaurant specials list takes more time than we have, especially at this time of the year, so we have set it aside for now. There are numerous special dinners listed in the above-mentioned events calendar.
13th December 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.
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