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Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet
Foods & Ingredients
Eat
In Guide’s Five time Outstanding Outlet Award Winner
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21 439 3169 / +27 83 229 1172
In this
week’s MENU:
On
Line Shop
This
week’s Product menu
Our
market activities - Neighbourgoods, Long Beach
Breedekloof
Wine District dinner
Indochine
Restaurant at Delaire Graff
What
we eat at home
Recipe:
Asian inspired glaze for salmon
Does
Facebook Lie?
Neighbourhood
dining
Wine
and Food Events with Valentine’s activities
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 The wonderful Nielsen Massey
extracts are always popular and many of you agree that there is nothing better.
Their vanilla extract and paste are superb and we are great fans of the orange
and the almond, as well as the coffee, chocolate, lemon and mint extracts. The
chocolate is perfect if you want to make a chocolate panna cotta. If you use
solid chocolate, you will end up with a mousse. This will give you the right
texture. Now, we have added the rose water and orange blossom water
concentrates to our range. The orange blossom water is sold out, until next
week, but we do have a less concentrated version in stock.
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.
On
Friday, February 8th, you will find us in the market at Long Beach Mall once again
Breedekloof Wine District dinner This is a wine area that we often
drive through but don’t stop at because, quite frankly, we have not been very impressed with the
wines in the past. The valley includes 24 wineries in the
Rawsonville, Slanghoek, Goudini and Breede River areas. It has superb
soils, both alluvial and mountain-side, access to plenty of water and produces
a great deal of wine each year. So we were intrigued to be invited to a Gala
wine pairing dinner at the Cullinan Hotel to sample some of them. It was a huge
gathering of media, trade, hospitality and tourism and customers, held in the
hotel’s banqueting hall. It was catered by a personal chef, Neill Anthony. We
have to say that we did find that some farm’s wines have improved very well,
but the area may still have a way to go before they reach their full potential.
We look forward to tasting their progress.
We were welcomed with a glass of off-dry bubbly made
from Sauvignon Blanc by Opstal and then dinner began. Cape Wine Master (CWM)
Duimpie Bayly was the Master of Ceremonies and gave us some background to the
area and the farms before we ate. Each of the other panellists then introduced
the group of four wines that were matched to one of the four courses. The panel
was made up of several well-known wine people, like Elsie Pels CWM, Ina Smith
of the Chenin Blanc Growers Association, Dr Winnie Bowman CWM, journalist Maryna Strachan, and of course Duimpie.
They had tasted over 50 wines before making their selection to go with the four
courses
Our first course was a salmon trout tartare on a
crisp, flaky pastry disk with fennel and dill and an olive oil mousseline. The
wine which we found matched this course best was the very interesting and very enjoyable De Hageveld
2011 from Deetlefs Estate - a blend of 75% Semillon, 17% Chardonnay, 8%
Sauvignon Blanc. It stood up well to the saltiness of the dish. R90 from the farm.
Our second course was a play on Pap en Vleis and was
more of an amuse in size than a main course. It consisted of a small square of
smooth parmesan polenta, thin slices of dried salted pork belly and some tomato
and onion relish. Groot Eiland’s Shiraz/Pinotage 2011 coped well with this dish.
R50 on the farm.
A duo of springbok with roast potatoes, tender green
beans, flaked almonds and,
strangely, red chilli
slices on a purée and a jus was the main course. A small loin fillet, rather
dry (but then they were feeding 150 people), was accompanied by a haché of slow
cooked springbok formed into a round cake. We loved the Bergsig Estate’s 2010
Icarus; robust, but smooth and elegant, which complimented the loin and its
fruit stood up well to the over-seasoned haché. Icarus is a blend of 85% Cabernet
Sauvignon and 15% Touriga National and sells for R121 on the farm.
Dessert was described as Broken Milk Tart with passion
fruit, but what arrived was a coupe dish with a sweet custard, a passion fruit
mousse and fresh passion fruit pulp. It was supported by the excellent Badsberg Badlese
2009, a natural sweet from Chenin Blanc. This lovely dessert wine won Platter's Wine of the Year in 2012,
earning 5 stars as well as double golds at Michelangelo and Veritas - just the
sort of thing we expect to see from the Breedekloof. Photographs of the event, with some of the people, the
food and the wines can be seen here.
Indochine Restaurant on Delaire Graff With
alarming forest fires burning behind the mountains in Franschhoek, we ventured
to the top of the Helshoogte pass on Monday for lunch at Indochine, the
second restaurant of the Delaire Graff estate. We were invited by the Estate’s
marketing and PR manager Tanja MacKay-Davidson. Executive Chef Christiaan
Campbell oversees the restaurant, where modern Asian flavours and textures are
presented with Head Chef Virgil Kahn’s contemporary flair. The emphasis here is
on healthy living, with fresh seasonal produce sourced locally from organic
farms and Delaire Graff Estate’s on-site greenhouse.
The restaurant has a real Asian feel, not only the
decor, but the whole building looks as though it has been transported from the
Thai/Malay peninsula, being open on almost all sides, cooled by the breezes and
with magnificent views of the valleys and mountains of the area. John’s photos
are all tinged with an amazing bronze light due to the huge fires which,
thankfully, did not come anywhere near the farm or the pass. It did look rather
like Armageddon at times though.
Tanja talked us through the seductive menu – we love
to eat and cook Asian food - while we enjoyed the chef’s complimentary offering
of tempura vegetables with two dipping sauces. Lynne had always wanted to try
Chicken Lataing with a Penang egg net and it was delicious. It looks rather
like a sushi roll. The egg net of crisp deep-fried egg encases the spicy
chicken and fresh herbs with counterpoints of small squares of citrus jelly,
lemon slices and sprinkled with crisp cashew nut brittle. Lynne drank a
glass of their very deep and complex, layered barrel-fermented 2011 Chenin
Blanc with this dish, a very good match.
John chose the crispy Ponzu duck, also with cashew nut
brittle and citrus jelly. He enjoyed a glass of the frivolous and pretty
Cabernet Franc rosé, full of strawberries and candyfloss, perfect for a summer
lunch and another great match.
Main courses gave us pause and we took a lot of time
to decide, as the menu has some very tempting choices. It was a little hot for
Asian soups, so we both ordered curry. Lynne had the Red Thai duck breast with
fresh litchis, coconut and ginger. They did warn us that the curries could be
very spicy and that they could cool them down, if we wanted, by the addition of
coconut milk, but we both like a bit of heat and didn’t find either very hot.
The sauce comes with the dish and you pour it over the food. John made a very
good choice of one of his favourite dishes, a delightfully tender beef Rogan
Josh. All these dishes are beautifully presented and the portions are not
large. The sommelier, Kathryn, recommended the Delaire 2010 Shiraz and we both
had a glass. As this smooth fruity wine is full of spice and complexity, it
does go extremely well with hot food.
Tanja ordered three side dishes for us to try:
unctuous stir fried aubergine, crisp vegetarian spring rolls and steamed
dumplings topped with mushrooms, all delicious.
John can always manage dessert, so he ordered and
enjoyed the Banana and white chocolate spring rolls served with banana caviar,
a chocolate praline ice cream and nut fudge, a tour de force! Lynne enjoyed a
pot of Asian herb and flower tea before we departed. John finished his meal
with an excellent double espresso. We will be back to try some of the other selections
off this interesting menu. Thank you, Tanja, for a lovely lunch and even better
company. Click here to see the photographs.
What we eat at
home A
reader queried why we tell you what we eat at home during the week. It is very
simple. Other readers often ask us for ideas of what to eat as the seasons go
by and how to use the ingredients we sell. When Lynne cooks at home, she often
creates recipes using local and seasonal food and, where she can, she includes
the exotic ingredients we sell - to show you how to use them in your cooking.
On Sunday night Lynne cooked pork shoulder chops,
marinated in Edmond Fallot’s green peppercorn mustard and then cooked in a
little Verjuice when the chops had been browned on both sides. We had this with
fresh sweet corn and mixed steamed seasonal vegetables.
On Monday we had very thin spaghetti (Capellini) with
garlic, good olive oil, lemon juice and grated parmesan cheese and a tomato and
guacamole salad.
Last night, John’s brother William, who lives in
Johannesburg, came to supper and we bought some very good fresh salmon from
Woolworths, which happens to be on special. As all three of us are always
watching our weight when eating at home, Lynne decided to do a very simple meal
of seared salmon, boiled new potatoes with mint, baby peas and a tomato and
fennel salad, using some interesting heritage tomatoes, also bought at
Woolworths. We served it with a 2010 Arendsig Sauvignon blanc from Robertson,
very elegant at 12.5% and with well-balanced acidity. You can mix up a very
quick dill sauce by adding chopped fresh dill to half and half mascarpone and a
good mayonnaise like Hellman’s. A note to our readers in other countries, our
Woolworths is more like Marks & Spencer and is not related to the defunct
Woolworth of the USA and the UK. A treat, which we enjoyed before the main
course with our tortilla guacamole starter, was a 1994 KWV cabernet sauvignon.
It had held its fruit very well, was beautifully soft and coped well with the
chilli in the guacamole. Interestingly, it was only 12% alcohol.
This week’s, therefore, recipe is very simple, it is a
marinade, glaze and sauce for the salmon and all of the ingredients come from
easily obtained bottled sauces which we keep in our pantry. Ponzu is a soya
sauce with citrus added. The chilli and garlic sauce should not be too
sweet because you are using honey.
Asian inspired glaze for
salmon
2 T Ponzu sauce – 2 T chilli and garlic
sauce – 1/2 T honey.
Mix, cover four salmon pieces with the sauce and put
into the fridge for as long as possible. Then heat up a ridged pan and, skin
side down first to get the skin crisp, quickly sear the salmon. You can use the
rest of the sauce as a glaze on top of the salmon when you serve it.
Does Facebook
Lie? Or...
Who is manipulating you on Facebook? Yesterday Lynne received an “invitation”
to a very, very expensive dinner and wine tasting and noticed, much to her
surprise and disbelief, that it said that John had already ticked the box to
say he was going to it. So she agreed and ticked the box, thinking perhaps we
had genuinely been invited to something which we simply do not have the income
to attend...
Then, a couple of hours later, there was another
invitation to a function in Elgin and, again, she was surprised that it
informed her that John had said he would be going. We were, of course, working
on that day and couldn’t go, even if we wanted to. This needed fuller
investigation, so she walked through to the kitchen and asked him. “NO!” said a
surprised John, “I have not responded to either invitation, but I
saw that you had”. And indeed, on his computer, there was Lynne’s positive
response to the Elgin invitation, which she had not made.
So we want to know, just what is going on? Can
someone else tick the box for you so that it looks as though you have joined
the invited guests? Very spurious indeed. Do they think that by adding people
who have followers or large mailing lists that their friends will then be
encouraged to go to these events? We feel used. And angry. And we will probably
report this to Facebook.
By the way, we do not think you should INVITE on
Facebook if you are intending to charge for an event. Inform us yes, send us all
the information you want, including the price, and we may well pay to come, but
an ‘invitation’ implies that it is an event you want us to attend as a media. Cynical, when you then
follow it up with the payment details on Computicket or other booking systems.
Neighbourhood dining A week or two
back, we wrote about some of the restaurants we enjoy in the Sea Point / Green
Point area. Some of you responded with the places you enjoy in your “neck of
the woods”. So it occurred to us that it might be a good idea to start a blog
about everyone’s local favourites. They’ll be personal choices, for your own
reasons, and not everyone will agree. We’ll put your name on your choice and
the date on which you told us about it, unless you feel that you might be pilloried
by anyone who disagrees. Taste is always personal and subjective and we don’t
believe that you should be ashamed of liking something. We no longer have time
to keep updating restaurant specials, so this may be a good way of
communicating a “people’s choice”. If it flies....
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. We have published a
new blog with a list of Valentine’s activities all over South Africa (with a
gap for the Eastern Cape, where nobody is saying anything... yet). Inspect it here and look for a
place to treat your love.
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.
31st 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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