Thursday, January 24, 2013

23rd January 2013 Main Ingredient's MENU - Our market activities, Vegetarian eating, Local and lekker, Recipe- Mediterranean Smoked Pork, Tomato and Cannellini Beans, Masterchef, Wine and Food Events


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
Setting sun over Noordhoek Beach – our farewell to the market at Cape Point Vineyards
In this week’s MENU:                                                              
*       On Line Shop
*       This week’s Product menu
*       Our market activities - Neighbourgoods, Long Beach, no more Cape Point Vineyards
*       Vegetarian eating
*       Local and lekker
*       Recipe: Mediterranean Smoked Pork, Tomato and Cannellini Beans
*       Masterchef
*       Wine and Food Events
*       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. 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. Please do not pay until we have confirmed availability and invoiced you. When you make an eft payment, make sure that it says who you are. We’ve had do a bit of detective work to identify anonymous payments. 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 Exotic spices (especially those from the Mediterranean) are flavour of the month, it seems, and we are selling lots of sumac, za’atar, ras el hanout, baharat and saffron.
Prego sauce is back in stock, so the fans who were disappointed after we ran out can enjoy it again.
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.
Tomorrow, Friday 25th, you will find us in the market at Long Beach Mall once again
CAPE POINT VINEYARDS MARKET     Sadly, we decided last week that we can no longer work at this very vibrant and busy market, because most of the people coming to the market are there simply to eat and drink from the wonderful selection provided for them and most are not shopping. You will notice that there are now only one or two traders selling anything other than prepared food to consume there. Our return travel distance is quite long and when we did our calculations for the 8 weeks we worked at the market, we actually made a small loss. However, if you live in the area, you will continue to find us at the Long Beach Mall market every second Friday from 9 am to 4pm, selling our large range of unusual and difficult to find ingredients.
You can of course also check out our web page and our on line shop: http://www.mainingredient.biz/main-ingredients-online-store.php
Our on-line shop is working very well and orders are growing every day so if you need something, think about going this route but do factor in delivery charges. We are very happy to post to anywhere in South Africa. Delivery in Sea Point, Green Point, Camps Bay and the CBD is free, but we do impose a small charge for the rest of the Peninsula. A couple of people commented last week that the links didn’t work. We tried them several times, on different computers, and had no trouble, so we hope you can open them today.
Vegetarian eating     We are not vegetarian, but we do love eating good vegetarian food. Several of our friends are. We just wanted to tell you of a very simple meal we had with two of them this week. Loraine prepared a dish of simple roasted and raw vegetables, a chickpea and brinjal dish, pickles, a tuna dip and humus. She made an enormous wholemeal loaf, some crisp melba toast and added a ciabatta. The meal was superb and we finished it off with a dish of the wonderful array of fresh fruit that is in season – grapes, pawpaw, cherries, litchis, mango and nectarines. This was washed down with good local wine and we had a great time. If you choose the freshest and best ingredients and you prepare them the best way you can, you can feast like kings.
Local and Lekker   Do you have a local restaurant that you visit often? We are extremely fortunate in Sea Point to have four that we love but the one we probably patronise the most is our local Chinese, Dynasty, which is in Nedbank Centre, above our old shop on the corner of Kloof and Irwinton Roads. The quality of their sushi is exceptional, although as everywhere, prices have had to creep up. But they also produce a huge range of other Chinese dishes, including some dumplings and dim sum. Do try their current chef’s special of a crispy duck salad. You get an enormous portion, covered in duck, avocado, tomatoes, lettuce and cucumber and dressed with a sweet chilli dressing and a sushi mayonnaise. Their ducks are imported from Thailand because, like us, they find local ducks to be too scrawny.
Lynne made the mistake of ordering some sushi recently at another of our favourite local haunts, the excellent Ocean Basket, and it was horrible; the rice was so cludgy and sticky she had to discard most of it. To their credit, they did offer to replace the dish but by then Lynne had eaten most of her small starter. But we do find their fish and seafood is always fresh and well cooked.
Our other local favourites are La Mouette, for an elegant meal in a lovely old house (even if the reconstruction of the Checkers building is creating a lot of nuisance –and their seasonal special is a bargain) and La Bohème, our best local bistro for affordable, well-cooked food with a good, well-priced wine list.
This next dish is a perfect summer one-pot supper, full of the flavours of the Mediterranean. The beans and tomatoes will cook down and start to thicken the dish, the potatoes and the lean smoked pork will add the substance and the herbs and smoked paprika add the final notes. Do not season until the end as the pork can be quite salty on its own. The wine to serve with this is a light red like a Valpolicella and do serve it chilled from the fridge. We didn’t have a Valpolicella, so enjoyed it with De Toren’s La Jeunesse Delicat, a light and young Bordeaux blend (made in more of a Beaujolais style) which should be served slightly chilled. Grangehurst Cape Rosé Blend would also be a good choice as it is quite a “serious” rosé, made from Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinotage, Merlot, Chenin Blanc and Shiraz - somewhere between a rosé and a light red.
Mediterranean Smoked Pork, Tomato and Cannellini Beans
Small onion, finely chopped - 1 T olive oil - 3 cloves garlic crushed – 200 ml dry white wine – tin of drained cannellini beans - tin of chopped tomatoes – a good handful of mixed fresh herbs finely chopped: parsley, basil , oregano, thyme– 6 Kassler chops, trimmed and halved - 5 potatoes peeled and chopped into quarters – 1 t smoked Spanish paprika - ½ t Tabasco sauce – freshly ground black pepper and salt to taste – 1 t sugar
Fry the onion in the oil until it is just starting to take on colour, add the garlic and stir for one minute to cook. Add the white wine and reduce down to half. Pour in the cannellini beans, the tomatoes, the herbs, paprika, Tabasco and the Kassler chops. Stir and leave to simmer for half an hour. Add the potatoes and if necessary a little extra liquid like vegetable stock. Simmer until the potatoes are done. Taste and season and add the sugar if the tomatoes have made the dish a little tart. Serve with steamed green vegetables or a fresh mixed green salad. Serves four.
MASTERCHEF     With the very good and intense British season just over, now we have two more to watch. Lynne is finding she has to watch the Australian Masterchef season in the morning in order to keep abreast of what is happening – they are certainly putting the early contestants through their paces. The Maggie Beer elimination challenge was at a level far above most of those poor aspiring cooks.
Apparently there will be 85 instalments in this series – would that SA television had this sort of budget at its disposal. Ours will only be about a quarter of that. Then, in the afternoons, there is the UK Masterchef Professionals where the level of cooking so far has been abysmal – none of them could even truss a chicken. And there was mention of a new season of Junior Masterchef coming soon.
Our own Masterchef is currently being filmed in Paarl for showing later in the year and, of course, there have been the two series from the USA: Top Chef Masters and Top Chef Desserts. Our PVR is getting crammed with all this delight and John is extremely thankful that we now have another one where he can store his sport, history and natural history favourites. If any of you watched Top Chef Masters series 3 you might be interested to hear that Lynne spotted and talked to one of the three finalists, Traci Des Jardins of Jardinière restaurant in San Francisco, at the Biscuit Mill. She was here for a three week holiday. We gave her several recommendations of where to eat while she was in the Cape.
And now Nigellissima has started....
NB: Just remember when they use an ingredient on TV that you have never heard of and don’t know where to find, contact us, we probably have it or we will know where to find it.
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.
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.





23rd January 2013

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