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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
+27 21 439 3169 / +27 83 656 4169 / +27 83 229 1172
Click on underlined and Bold words to open links to pictures, blogs, websites or more information
Lord of all he surveys: Bruno the boerbul looking over the Breede River Valley
In this week’s MENU:
Products Our market activities The Planet Restaurant at the Mount Nelson Table d’Haute at Cabrière Villiera tasting room Coffee & cake at Balducci Lemon, fennel & herb chicken Events and Restaurant specials Wine courses & cooking classesProducts We are always looking for new products to enhance your cooking and dining experience. To see what we have available for you, 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 Come and visit us at the Old Biscuit Mill’s brilliant, exciting and 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. Click here for a map. We will be back at Long Beach Mall tomorrow, Friday 22nd June from 09h00 to 16h00. We look forward to seeing you there.
A WEEK OF BEING SPOILT ROTTEN Many people say that they are envious of our life, which we do so appreciate and enjoy. There are lovely highs like most of this past week’s events and then some rather disappointing lows, which we don’t write about as they are not worth it. We don’t earn much money from it, but we do have a great deal of fun, superb food and wine and so appreciate interacting with our great customers and you, the readers of our publication, when we meet.
FUN AND FINE FOOD AT THE NELLIE Because we had recommended the Mount Nelson as a venue for the Old Mutual Trophy Awards, we had two invitations from people we know there and we finally made it last Thursday night, when we had dinner with Gaby Palmer Bolton, the Regional PRO of the hotel and the other Orient Express properties in Southern Africa, and we had a lovely evening together. Having a drink in the bar beforehand, we were chatting to Chef Rudi Liebenberg, who also had invited us, when in walked the publishers and the photographer of Opulent Living magazine, which recently featured top chefs, to present Rudi with his framed limited edition portrait.
In to dinner at the Planet Restaurant and we spent quite a while studying the several menus before deciding to go with the Journey Menu. Normally only available for the whole table, Rudi was happy to prepare this just for the two of us, while the others ordered from the main menu. We have known Carl Habel, the sommelier, for several years and he was delighted to see us, as he said it would give him an opportunity to open some of his older cellar stock which needed quality and age checking and to have other wine people to taste with him; an offer we could not refuse. So we had some marvellous aged wines with our dinner. A Rijks Semillon 2002, deep and rich and lanolin smooth, still had lots of fruit and acid but needs drinking quickly before it loses its edge. A First Sighting Pinot Noir was absolutely at its peak and so enhanced our dinner and then from Delheim’s Vera Cruz estate a special fruity, smooth and silky Shiraz 08. Finally, the truly wonderful dessert wine, De Wetshof Edeloes 2000 Noble Late Harvest was a lifetime experience. How we wished we had bought some of all these wines when introduced. There are still bottles in the Planet vinoteque so you too can go and taste them when you have dinner there. Click here to see the food we ate.
TABLE d’HAUTE AT CABRIERE Haute Cabriere invited us to come and experience their “Table d’ Haute” menu (This is not a spelling mistake but a play on their name.) At R150 for four courses or only R250 with each course paired with a glass of matched Cabriere wine, this menu is available for lunch on Tuesdays to Fridays during the winter months. We think this must be one of the best value menus on offer at the moment. The menu changes regularly according to what is available: as they say “the best ingredients of the day”. And if you have any food allergies or dislikes, they can cater for you.
This has been one of our favourite restaurants for years, but we hadn’t been for a while, so it was a delight to see that they have extended the area outside the restaurant and, on a glorious warm winter day such as we had, you can book a table on the terrace under umbrellas and enjoy the fabulous view down the valley with the great food and wine. We were treated to a couple more courses than appeared on the menu, just to give us an idea of what you might encounter on your visit. It was a long and delightful lunch spent with Alton van Biljon, their handsome and urbane Restaurant Manager and some time at the end of the meal spent with their chef Ryan Shell and meeting other Cabriere staff.
If you don’t want the set menu, you can eat à la Carte and design your own meal. We love the fact that you can have half or full portions of everything on the menu and they recommend which wine matches the dish. Click here to see the food, the menus and the views. Reservations & enquiries: restaurant@cabriere.co.za. Phone 021 876 3688
VILLIERA’S MODERN TASTING ROOM On our way to Franschhoek, we dropped in at the invitation of winemaker owner Geoff Grier to see the revamped Villiera Tasting room. It is filled with great wines to taste and some lovely modern pieces of furniture, which is also art. Relaxing and warm in front of their wood burning stove, we met Megaflash the cat, who spends most of the winter on a chair there. We tasted some of the great wines and liked them very much before we had to rush off to Cabriere. Click here to see the tasting room.
FATHERS DAY REWARD AT BALDUCCI John needed a good experience on Father‘s day so he demanded we go for good coffee and cake after lunch. We tried Cassis in the Gardens Centre, but they closed as we arrived at 3, so we shot off to the Waterfront where we had a lovely time. John ordered a chocolate brownie with his double espresso – what arrived was a rich and ridiculously delicious slice of chocolate torte with nuts, covered in a sticky dark chocolate sauce with a huge dollop of real vanilla ice cream. Clare had a cappuccino and the Lindt white chocolate cheesecake with ice cream - it was so rich that half went home in a doggie bag. Lynne, who does not have a very sweet tooth, settled for a really good double espresso. It made up for the rest of the day.
This week’s recipe is quite a simple one. Lynne has been experimenting a little this week, not everything worked but this did and was enjoyable. It is one of those you can leave alone in the oven for it to cook slowly.
LEMON, FENNEL AND HERB CHICKEN
1 onion, finely chopped – 1 T olive oil - 8 Chicken joints, skin removed – seasoned flour - 2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped – 1 t fresh thyme, 1 t fresh rosemary, 1 t fresh oregano, all finely chopped – 1 or 2 bulbs of fennel, sliced – 1 whole preserved lemon, finely sliced – 300 ml chicken stock – 10 new potatoes, unpeeled cut in half lengthwise – salt and pepper
In an oven proof casserole with a lid, fry the onion in the oil till soft. Coat the chicken pieces in the seasoned flour, then brown them in the oil and onions. Put in the garlic, the herbs, the fennel, the lemon and the stock. Season well and then cover with a layer of the potatoes. Bake in the oven at 180°C for about an hour or until the chicken is falling off the bone. Serve with brightly coloured vegetables like spinach, courgettes, carrots and butternut as it is quite a monotone looking dish. Serves four.
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 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.
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.
Restaurant Special offers. Some more 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.
21st June 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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