Wednesday, January 16, 2013

16th January 2013 Main Ingredient's MENU - Pringle Bay, Cuvée at Simonsig, Choices, Dinner for Five, Orange panna cotta recipe


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
The view across Pringle Bay towards Gordon’s Bay
In this week’s MENU:
*       On Line Shop
*       This week’s Product menu
*       Our market activities
*       Pringle Bay
*       Restaurant review: Cuvée at Simonsig
*       Choices
*       Dinner for Five
*       Recipe: Orange panna cotta
*       Wine and Food Events
*       Wine courses & cooking classes
To tell our whole story here would take too much space, so take a look at our Main Ingredient blogs. Follow this link: http://adamastorbacchus.blogspot.com/ to where you can read current and 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
This week’s Product menu      Sumac is in steady demand and we will have more today. Middle Eastern foods are always popular in our climate and the za’atar spice mix and the Moroccan ras el hanout are steady favourites as are orange blossom water and rose water, which are so essential for Eastern Mediterranean recipes. You can find them in our online shop, which is performing very well. We are continuing to update it with new products and with photographs of products. Click here to see the shop. When you place an order, please 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.
We will have more Prego sauce on Friday afternoon.
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 tomorrow evening, January 17th. Come and buy some treats, enjoy some of their stunning wines and have a picnic while you watch the sun go down. On Friday 25th, you will find us at Long Beach Mall once again.
We have had a marvellously busy week, doing family and friend things, not the sort of things we ever go into detail about in MENU. We spent two days in Pringle Bay, staying with friends from Johannesburg and just catching up and enjoying a long walk on the beach in quite breezy and wet weather. We attended a lovely family wedding in Franschhoek when Lynne’s niece got married and we have had overseas and local friends to dinner.
While in Pringle Bay, we did happen to visit Lemon and Lime, a really well presented and stocked deli which impressed us so much that we have we have sent Abigail Donnelly, the editor of Eat In magazine, our nomination for the next edition of the magazine. If you are in or passing through the area, do call in and see what they are about. Very like our old concept in Sea Point with lots and lots of excellent local produce; they also have a very good wine selection.
Cuvée     On Sunday we were taken by a generous friend to Cuvée restaurant on Simonsig farm. It turned out to be another perfect day in the Cape and we had a table under the trees and an umbrella on the terrace, with another fantastic view of the mountains and vineyards. A very jovial and fun lunch ensued and we really loved what we ate and drank and the company. Simonsig has a comprehensive wine list and is, perhaps, best known as the originators of Cap Classique sparkling wine with their excellent Kaapse Vonkel. We opted for their very good, fresh sauvignon blanc, which is made from 80% Simonsig grapes and 20% from Darling. Three of us had the venison main course and we chose the Simonsig SMV (Shiraz & mourvedre with a dash of viognier). It is light enough to serve lightly chilled with a summer lunch and is also quite light on the pocket. We enjoyed it. Ripe fruit flavour with a touch of coffee matched the dish very well. Click here to see more, the menu and the pictures of the food and the view.
Give us more - choice?     One of the dishes Lynne ordered was Springbok loin with tongue. She has come up with a slightly new concept for those chefs out there. She loves tongue a little more than she loves Springbok. When offering these combination dishes, how about offering the choice of being able to choose more of one component as your main ingredient. In other words, lots of tongue with a little springbok loin or the other way around. Would this work practically in a commercial kitchen?
We do not approve, at all, of people trying to tinker with a conceived menu which has taken the chef a lot of time and trouble to come up with, source the ingredients and prepare but if you have cooked both, could one not choose more of the ingredient one likes the most?
Dinner for five     Our dinner party on Monday night was for our Johannesburg friends and a friend who has just arrived from London for three months. As the day was hot, Lynne made three dips: a real guacamole, humus and an aioli and served lots of crudités and nachos to accompany. We had Graham Beck Brut Rosé as a sundowner and followed this with a bottle of Thelema Sutherland chardonnay 2008. At this point the sea breezes started to blow strongly and we had to retreat inside to our quite warm dining room.
Our main course was 'Pollo Orvietana' - Chicken with Kalamata olives, herbs, potatoes and Balsamic vinegar, the perfect one dish meal for a warm evening, served with a green bean and mixed leaf salad with croutons, pecan nuts and a pomegranate dressing. We had a lovely bottle of Cathy Marshall’s 2004 Syrah which went perfectly with this quite tangy dish and was smooth and supple and fruity. Dessert was an Orange panacotta served with granadilla puree, cherries and strawberries and this went with a bottle of Nuy 2005 White Muscadel (not the whole bottle!)
This was quite a simple meal to prepare as no-one wants to spend much time in the kitchen at the moment. The only difficulty was the aioli which split twice because of the heat and the recipe Lynne followed made it much too salty and so having to start again was a blessing in disguise. Someone should really send the Salt Police out to check recipes sometimes. One egg and a teaspoon of salt? No way, unless you want to be up all night drinking water.
Panna cotta (cooked cream) takes minutes to prepare. You can alter your flavours according to your whim; just keep the liquid quantities the same. If you want to make a chocolate panna cotta, you will need to use the Nielsen Massey Chocolate extract rather than melted chocolate, which would turn it into a heavier chocolate blancmange but you can serve with chocolate curls or shavings or a chocolate sauce.
You need to make these the day before or in the morning, as they do need time to set. This recipe makes 6 individual servings.
Orange Panna Cotta
3 leaves of gelatine (7.5 g) – 500 ml cream – 25g sugar – 50 ml Curacao orange liqueur – 1 t orange extract – 1 granadilla – 12 cherries – 12 strawberries
Soften the gelatine in cold water for a few minutes only. Heat the rest of the ingredients in a heavy bottomed pan; do not bring to the boil. The longer you cook this, the less alcohol will remain in the mix. Remove the gelatine from the water, shake off any extra moisture and add it to the cream and stir till dissolved. Cool slightly then pour into individual ramekins or cups. Put them into the fridge for at least 6 hours to set.
To serve, turn them out carefully onto each dessert plate and decorate with a spoonful each of granadilla pulp, 2 cherries and 2 strawberries
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. 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.







16th 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 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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