Friday, March 29, 2013

28th March 2013 Main Ingredient's MENU - Easter, The Hurst Campus graduation, New wines, Idiotic liquor law Part Two, Recipe Vietnamese Style Beef stew


MENU
Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet Foods & Ingredients
Eat In Guide’s Five time Outstanding Outlet Award Winner
+27 21 439 3169 / +27 83 229 1172
Evening light on the Paardeberg hills
In this week’s MENU:                                                              
*       On Line Shop
*       This week’s Product menu
*       Our market activities - Neighbourgoods, Long Beach
*       Easter
*       The Hurst Campus graduation
*       New wines
*       Idiotic liquor law – Part Two
*       Recipe: Vietnamese Style Beef stew
*       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. Use the form on the website to email us your order and we will send you the final invoice once we’ve made sure stock is available. Click here to see the shop.
This week’s Product menu    One of the best condiments we can recommend is our range of French mustards. We have them from two producers: Vilux and Edmond Fallot. The latter produces mustards which are much more like the hot English mustards, but with one wonderful difference: as well as the traditional smooth and grainy Dijon mustards, we have mustards blended with herbs and fruits like tarragon, basil, green peppercorn and blackcurrant. The Vilux mustard range includes white truffle, gingerbread, champagne and honey mustards. So we have something for almost every palate. The tarragon mustard can be blended with butter and inserted under the skin of a chicken before roasting. It imparts the most wonderful flavour. Try it and enjoy! See them here.
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. We will be back at the market in Long Beach Mall, Sun Valley, Fish Hoek on Friday March 22nd. Our  April dates will be Fridays 12th and 19th.
We send our felicitations to all who are celebrating your religious holy days this weekend, particularly Easter and Passover. Thank you to everyone who has send greetings to us; they have come from many corners of the earth.
Easter     This holiday is certainly time to spend with your family.  We are going to meet our great niece for the first time. Our nephew, Richard, is here from Johannesburg to run the Two Oceans ultra marathon and he has brought his wife and daughter with him. Our daughter, Clare, will join us. Lynne will be cooking a fairly traditional gammon and hoping that the weather improves tomorrow, some salads for lunch, hopefully out on the deck looking at the sea. We have a panettone, so there may well be one of those wonderfully vanilla bread and butter puddings as well. The rest of the weekend, after a hopefully very busy day at the Biscuit Mill on Saturday, where we hope to see lots of you, will probably be nice and quiet - and restful, as we are heading for another busy period after it.
Taste of Cape Town competition    We have received an unprecedented number of entries with correct answers to the question we asked in the competition to win tickets to the Taste of Cape Town. The right answer was, of course, the Green Point Cricket Club. Answers such as “Cape Town” didn’t cut the mustard, Dijon or otherwise. We have sent the names of the ten lucky people in our draw to the organisers, who will contact the winners. Thank you to all the entrants, some of whom sent in several emails. We would only accept the first. We are very grateful for your interest and participation.
The Hurst Campus     We are always delighted to be invited to the graduation ceremony of a good culinary academy and to see the new  generation of chefs and hospitality professionals graduate. This year’s graduation at The Hurst Campus – formerly known as The Culinary Academy - was held at Allée Bleue near Franschhoek on Tuesday evening and we believe that there are some very interesting and keen graduates entering the hospitality market. We do hope that there are jobs available for all these talented youngsters; they certainly have had good training. They follow a long line of excellent chefs working at some top restaurants, here and abroad.  We were very interested to learn that The Hurst Campus has become the first such academy in Africa to receive an international endorsement and gain admission as a member of the renowned French Institut Paul Bocuse Worldwide Alliance. Director Rebecca Hurst has some new and exciting plans afoot for the Hurst Academy and we will be announcing them in the near future. Click here to see some photographs. To learn more about The Hurst Campus look here .
New wine to taste      We are often sent samples of wines by the wine industry, so that we can taste them and write about them. We recently received two of the new wines released by Weltevrede Estate in Bonnievale, who are currently celebrating their 100th birthday. Following the launch of their Vanilla Chardonnay in 2011, which is growing in popularity every day, Weltevrede have added three equally delectable siblings to their strikingly simplistic family of wines: the Weltevrede Tropico Sauvignon Blanc 2012, Cherrychoc Merlot 2012 and Cigarbox Shiraz 2012. They are aimed at the easy drinking market and are priced from R57 for the whites and R68 for the reds from their online store. We tasted the Tropico and the Cherrychoc Merlot. 
The general public is, apparently, asking for much more tropical flavours in its Sauvignons Blanc. We have to confess that this is not the style we want to drink; we like the classic expression of the grape - being lean and crisp, fragrant and full of minerality. However, Tropico is a very easy-to-quaff white wine, full of melon and guava, more like a Chenin to us than a Sauvignon, but we did like it. The Cherrychoc Merlot will definitely appeal to the wider market; it is soft and smooth with some body and will fulfil all your expectations  as it tastes exactly as it says “on the box”: full of sweet cherries and milk chocolate. We had it with the boerewors we made and they were a delicious match.
Idiotic liquor law – Part Two     After eleven years of happy trading in the V&A Waterfront, Caroline Rillema is closing that store, and moving it elsewhere. She will, of course, continue trading from her Strand Street store. High rentals and the new shorter trading hours imposed by the Liquor Board and the Cape Town City Council are her main reasons, with a prohibition on Sunday trading being a particular concern. The new trading conditions were scheduled to come into effect at midnight on Monday. And now, just as she is proceeding with the dreadful drudgery of closing the shop, our blessed City Council announced an about turn yesterday, succumbing to pressure from a host of potential voters who have said that they are likely to change their votes at the next election. Democracy works. They were vociferous in saying how important it was to prohibit liquor sales on Sundays, but they have now decided that they will consider allowing Sunday trading for businesses with current Sunday licences in non-residential areas and that condition is in abeyance. They really are a pathetic bunch of clowns. We have been saying, since these new licensing conditions were first mooted several years ago, that they were badly thought out, hit the people least likely to abuse alcohol, will have no effect on the thousands of illicit shebeens and will be largely unenforceable. But the about face will be welcomed by Vaughan Johnson, who has been vociferous about it in the media (well done Vaughan!), Harley’s Liquors (who planned court action) and several others and, of course, by people like us.
Of prime concern to many of us who have large collections of wine is the stupid clause, still in the legislation, that no one may have no more than 150 litres (about 200 bottles) of any alcoholic beverages. This may seem a lot to many of you, but we like to be able to choose a suitable wine to match something Lynne is preparing in the kitchen and to have that wine properly matured, which almost certainly means that it is older than anything we can buy from the retail trade. Many of us have proper wine cellars with more than 200 bottles in them. We certainly don’t plan to have a party and drink all our wine in one massive binge. The people who proposed this law obviously drink wine from 5 litre boxes, or something similar, if they drink wine at all. We wrote about building a wine cellar in Classic Wine last year and some of you will, no doubt, remember the article.
Back to Caroline - closing the shop entails a terrible waste of beautiful shopfitting and paraphernalia and she would like to partner someone in a franchise or similar agreement in a new location which can use them. You can contact her through her website www.carolineswine.com. Bargain hunters can benefit from the closing of her Waterfront store. She is holding a Final Sale on Saturday, Sunday and Monday this Easter weekend (30th March to 1st April). There is a discount of 20% off all wines, and 30% off all spirits. No e-mail orders or deliveries, cash/credit card & carry only. Call Lara or Lieze for more information at 021 425 5701.
Weekend guests     You may have sudden guests this weekend, so Lynne thought you might like a quick one dish recipe to help you. It takes about an hour and a quarter to cook. You can make it the previous day and heat and add the spring onions just before you serve. Add more chilli if you like the heat.
Vietnamese Style Beef stew
1 T canola oil – 2 large cloves of garlic, chopped – 1 large onion, chopped – 1 stalk of lemon grass, finely sliced – 450g stewing beef, in cubes – 550ml (2 cups) good beef stock  – 2 t five spice powder – 3 T soya sauce – 2 T fish sauce – 1 fresh red chilli, chopped – 1 T palm sugar – 3 spring onions, chopped – freshly ground black pepper – fresh coriander or basil sprigs
Heat the oil in a casserole over a high heat and stir fry the garlic, onion and lemongrass for about a minute. Add the beef and stir fry till it has some colour. Add five spice powder and fry for a minute.  Add the stock, soy, fish sauce, chilli, palm sugar and mix well. Cover, and lower the heat to a gentle simmer for about an hour. Check that it doesn’t dry up. Add a little water, if necessary, to keep moist. When the meat is tender, add the spring onions and black pepper to taste and cook for a further three minutes.  Garnish with fresh coriander sprigs and serve with rice, baby corns, mange tout, and baby carrots.
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 receive 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 of Cathy’s WSET and other courses here and here and the CWA courses 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. Emma Freddi runs the Enrica Rocca cooking courses at her home in Constantia. Brett Nussey’s Stir Crazy courses are now being run from Dish Food and Social’s premises in Main Road Observatory (opposite Groote Schuur hospital).



28th March 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.
This electronic journal has been sent to you because you have personally subscribed to it or because someone you know has asked us to send it to you or forwarded it to you themselves. Addresses given to us will not be divulged to any person or organisation. We collect them only for our own promotional purposes. We own our mailing software and keep our mailing list strictly confidential. If you wish to be added to our mailing list, please click here to send us a message and if you wish to be removed from our mailing list, please click here to send us a message.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Chefs and hospitality managers graduate at The Hurst Campus

The functions venue at Allée Bleue with graduands lined up to receive their diplomas
and they came through, one by one
Photographs for the prize winners
There's always a latecomer
Rebecca Hurst with Tanja Beutler of Topaz Wines, who teaches the wine appreciation course
Students, staff and guests, after the ceremony, chatting and enjoying the refreshments
 © John & Lynne Ford. Adamastor & Bacchus 2013

Friday, March 22, 2013

130313 Main Ingredient's MENU - Blaauwklippen Zinfandel tasting,Soirée at Haute Cabrière, Celebration at Savoy Cabbage, Two Oceans, Idiotic liquor law, Cooking this week, Celeriac & Potato puree with truffle sa


MENU
Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet Foods & Ingredients
Eat In Guide’s Five time Outstanding Outlet Award Winner
+27 21 439 3169 / +27 83 229 1172
Evening on the Sea Point beachfront
In this week’s MENU:                                                              
*       On Line Shop
*       This week’s Product menu
*       Our market activities - Neighbourgoods, Long Beach
*       Blaauwklippen Zinfandel tasting
*       Summer Soirée at Haute Cabrière
*       Wedding anniversary celebration at Savoy Cabbage
*       Two Oceans cycle race
*       Idiotic liquor law
*       Cooking this week
*       Recipe: Celeriac and Potato puree with truffle salt
*       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. Use the form on the website to email us your order and we will send you the final invoice once we’ve made sure stock is available. Click here to see the shop.
This week’s Product menu  This week’s product is Truffles. We sell whole black truffles preserved in truffle jus; real truffle oils in two sizes, both black and white, and each bottle has slivers of  truffle; luxurious truffle butter;  black tartufata: a mixture of mushrooms, black truffles and olives and white tartufata which contains champignons, white truffle, parmesan cheese, cream and herbs (this is also known as truffle cream), and truffle salt. We have access to imported fresh truffles from Italy and France when in season later in the year. Frozen truffles are available on order only. We do not currently have a supplier of Namibian truffles. See our on-line shop for prices, etc.
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. We will be back at the market in Long Beach Mall, Sun Valley, Fish Hoek on Friday March 22nd. Our April dates will be Fridays 12th and 19th.
Blaauwklippen Zinfandel Tasting     Zinfandel is not a well-known wine variety in South Africa, there were 32.4 hectares in 2011 (only 28.4 10 years ago, so slowly increasing) However it is only .03% of SA’s annual crop and has only 4 producers currently, but we think it has great potential and can show very, very well if ably handled. Blaauwklippen, one of the major producers, holds an annual tasting of their Zinfandels and some from other countries. We were invited to sample some Australian Zinfandels together with some really good Blaauwklippens last Thursday at the Radisson Blu hotel.
Zinfandel is full of bramble, rhubarb and cherry cola flavours, with relatively high alcohols. With careful wooding, it can age very well and show a great full fruit mouthful with elegant chalky tannins. The red wines we tasted varied in alcohol from 14.5% right up to 17.5% while the white was low at 12.5% and the well-balanced Noble Late Harvest only 7.79%. While the Australian wines were very good indeed, our favourite wine of the tasting was the Blaauwklippen Reserve/Single Vineyard, although the Smallwater from Western Australia came very close. 
Later we had the Reserve and three other Blaauwklippen zinfandels paired with a lovely lunch served to us outside on the deck overlooking the boat harbour and the Waterfront. We have known executive chef Grant Kennedy since his days teaching at The Culinary Academy and he has since done stints at Sun City and Fancourt. He produced a very interesting amuse of beef carpaccio stuffed with dried peach. The starter of Pink tuna pavé was lovely and fresh. Then came a rather bland sorbet of prickly pear, full of hard pips, but Rolf enlivened this by another dash of the excellent Grappa.
The main course of a Journey of Duck was really perfect with the Blaauwklippen Reserve 2011. If you are serving duck soon, seriously consider serving this wine. Grant gave us a confit leg with gooseberry jelly, a samoosa stuffed with thigh and goats curd accompanied by duck liver parfait and a perfectly cooked piece of sliced duck breast with Naartjie orange jus. Heaven on one plate.
Dessert was not shabby either and has inspired Lynne into planning another dinner party just to make one of the components: a crisp tart base filled with melted bitter chocolate (75%) mixed with ripe avocado. Who would have thought of this? It is a glossy and rich beauty. And it SO works. Yes, it is rich and you are free to add as much or as little sugar as you like. Because the tart was served with a beautifully intense coconut and blackberry semi-freddo ice cream and a light-as-air raisin tea and rooibos bread pudding, it was almost unsweetened. And the match with the Noble Late Harvest Zinfandel was very good. Click here to see the photos
Summer Soirée at Haute Cabrière     Following this long lunch and tasting we only had time to go to one of our suppliers to collect stock and then it was off to Franschhoek for this event they hold every Thursday evening from 5 to 7.30. How lovely to sit outside the restaurant on a summer evening drinking a glass or two of their Pierre Jordan MCC bubbly listening to good jazz and looking out over the beautiful valley. You can order cheese platters and we should inform you that the one we had was enormous. We were joined by owner Hildegard von Arnim and their tasting room manager Ingrid Petersen. We had a very gemütlich evening.  Click here to see the pictures. Do go to their website for details of who will be playing.
Wedding anniversary celebration at Savoy Cabbage     Saturday was our 10th wedding anniversary and John decided to take Lynne out for dinner somewhere special. Because he left it a little too late, he was unable to get a booking at the new Pot Luck Club, so he booked instead at another of our favourite restaurants, Savoy Cabbage, where we have spent several anniversaries and birthdays in the past. At the suggestion of Frank, the genial and very professional restaurant manager, we delightedly agreed to let them give us a tasting menu, matched with some of their very good wines. They don’t normally do this but, if you talk to Frank, he might be persuaded for a very special occasion.
We managed four half portions of starters each and then two rich main courses, after which we begged them to stop as we could not manage another mouthful and certainly not dessert. Click here to see the pictures of the delicious food. Savoy Cabbage is not on the top 20 restaurant list and we think this is a serious omission as the level of culinary excellence produced by Chef Peter Pankhurst in this kitchen is legendary. It certainly is on our top 20 list. They were incredibly generous to us and made our anniversary a very special evening. We are very grateful indeed.
Two Oceans cycle race     Congratulations to all you brave and foolish people who cycled in this epic 105 kilometre race around the Cape Peninsula. We watched first on TV and saw the finish and then went down the hill to watch the rest of the race from  friends’ balcony overlooking Beach Road at Sunset Beach, Bantry Bay, where we cheered a few thousand of you on, nibbled good brunch food, drank some bubbly, got surprisingly sunburnt, even though we were in the shade and then went off to do our weeks shopping. Our young neighbours Rob and Alex came home exhausted but enervated later in the day and obviously had a marvellous ride for a worthy charity. This race raises millions for good causes. And no, we will not be entering anytime soon. Age and a lack of serious will prevent us.
Idiotic liquor law  We wrote about this for Wine.co.za some time ago, when the proposed Liquor Act first made the news. Now we are about to experience it. It will become law on April 1st, a very appropriate date. There are three times as many unlicensed, i.e. illegal, liquor outlets in the Western Cape as legal outlets and our authorities are quite unable to do anything about them. Now they have reduced the liquor trading hours for the legally licensed businesses like Caroline’s and Vaughan Johnson in the V&A Waterfront, Wine Concepts and numerous other responsible businesses elsewhere in the Western Cape, who sell quality wine and whose market is not the typical abuser of the product. Their closing time has been moved back from 8pm to 6pm and there will be no Sunday trading allowed. A result of this is that Caroline will be closing her Waterfront shop because most of her sales happen between 6 and 8pm or on Sunday. Other retailers are sure to be similarly impacted.
Of more immediate concern to us and to many of you is the clause which restricts private individuals’ ownership of wine to 200 bottles. Many of us have built up collections of wine over a long time, so that we can enjoy our wine when it has reached optimum maturity. This does not necessarily mean that we sit on hoards of expensive labels. There are many inexpensive wines which are much more enjoyable when they have had a few years of rest in a quiet place.
We believe that we can apply for a permit to hold more than 200 bottles, so we encourage all of you who have larger cellars to apply to the Western Cape liquor board, so that we can all remain within the law. It would, of course, be interesting to see how they would cope with a large number of applications, when they find it difficult to handle applications for trading licences. We have also not heard what they recommend owners of large collections should do to bring their stock level down to the legal 200 bottles if we don’t get permits. We are not allowed to sell it, don’t like binge drinking and would hate to pour it all down the drain.
The intention might be good, but the lesson of Prohibition in 1920s USA has obviously not been learned. Liquor trading is already mostly underground; this just buries it deeper. The new law will do nothing to stop inappropriate use of alcoholic beverages; it will just hurt or inconvenience the people who do not drink to excess or who sell good products responsibly.
Cooking this week     Lynne has already tried to recreate the Savoy Cabbage tomato tart, but using commercial flaky pastry is never the same and this wasn’t.  She didn’t have gruyère cheese but did have some French herb and garlic Boursin (on special last week at Woolworths) and this tastes very good indeed under good tomatoes. 
Then we were given some rather undrinkable new wine – lots of fruit but far too much acidity and youth. So that went into an Ostrich Bourguignon.  A tip – if you get bored trying to peel the baby onions for this dish, put them into a small pot and cook for about ten minutes. The skins will peel off easily and you can add them into the bourguignon. Lynne added lots of brandy with the wine and on the first night the taste was lovely, but on the second serving the wine had turned the stew a bit sour. The French are right, use the best wine you can afford in a Bourguignon.
This week’s recipe     Celeriac (celery root) is in season at the moment, it makes a very interesting vegetable puree and, when mixed with potato, makes a thick mash which is an alternative to starches to serve with a rich meat dishes. It may be an unusual vegetable to you, but it is not an alien one. It does have a slight celery taste but is more like parsnip or turnip in texture than potato. It comes as a large fairly unsightly round root which needs peeling well to take out all the imperfections.
In France, they make a wonderful salad with grated (râpé) raw celeriac root in a remoulade sauce, a mild thick mayonnaise seasoned with Dijon mustard. If you are working with celeriac, you need to put it into acidulated water or it will turn brown.
Celeriac and Potato puree with truffle salt
1 large celeriac root, peeled and cut into 2 cm cubes – 3 large potatoes, peeled and cut into 2 cm cubes - ground white pepper – butter – truffle salt
Boil the cubes of celeriac and potato in water until they are soft. Put through potato ricer or mash well. Add butter, white pepper to taste then add enough truffle salt to your own taste and serve.
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 have a large number of exciting events to entertain you right through the year.
Learn about wine and cooking We receive 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 of Cathy’s WSET and other courses here and here and the CWA courses 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. Emma Freddi runs the Enrica Rocca Italian cooking courses at her home in Constantia. Brett Nussey’s Stir Crazy courses are now being run from Dish Food and Social’s premises in Main Road Observatory (opposite Groote Schuur hospital).

13th March 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.
This electronic journal has been sent to you because you have personally subscribed to it or because someone you know has asked us to send it to you or forwarded it to you themselves. Addresses given to us will not be divulged to any person or organisation. We collect them only for our own promotional purposes. We own our mailing software and keep our mailing list strictly confidential. If you wish to be added to our mailing list, please click here to send us a message and if you wish to be removed from our mailing list, please click here to send us a message.

130322 Main Ingredient's MENU - Making sausage, URGe Urban Deli, RECM Ten Year Old Wine Awards, WineStyle Summer Wine Party, Summer Chenin Showcase, New Tasting room at Vondeling, Stir Crazy cooking Thai food


MENU
Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet Foods & Ingredients
Eat In Guide’s Five time Outstanding Outlet Award Winner
+27 21 439 3169 / +27 83 229 1172
A row of bluegums at Ormonde, Darling
In this week’s MENU:                                                              
*       On Line Shop
*       This week’s Product menu
*       Our market activities - Neighbourgoods, Long Beach
*       Making sausage
*       URGe Urban Deli
*       RE:CM Ten Year Old Wine Awards
*       WineStyle Summer Wine Party
*       Summer Chenin Showcase
*       New Tasting room at Vondeling
*       Stir Crazy cooking Thai food
*       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. Use the form on the website to email us your order and we will send you the final invoice once we’ve made sure stock is available. Click here to see the shop.
This week’s Product menu    We have always had a good range of rare and unusual spice mixtures. Have a look at our online shop for blends you will have seen in books like Ottolenghi and on television, like Za’atar from the Middle East, Ras el Hanout, from Morocco, Shichimi Togarashi from Japan and Garam Masala from India. We also have spices like sumac, whole nutmeg and really pungent black pepper. We have been posting a lot of these lately to various destinations, but especially to Durban – possibly because the spices most readily available there are related to curries.
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. We will be back at the market in Long Beach Mall, Sun Valley, Fish Hoek on Friday March 22nd. Our  April dates will be Fridays 12th and 19th.

Sometimes when you look back over a week of absolutely fantastic events, panic overtakes the writer. How to do justice in words to all of these and is there enough time in the day. People tell us today is a Public Holiday? Huh? Here goes
Making links     Freddie Hirsch, in conjunction with Stellenbosch Hills wines and this year, Getaway magazine, hold an annual meat-related competition. This year it is a Droë wors competition. We will be announcing how you and other food enthusiasts can enter your own attempts later in the year but, in the meantime, we found out how to make the stuff. And it was a revelation. We assumed it was going to be very complicated and were more than pleasantly surprised when we discovered that we have half of the equipment at home already (the mincer) and now just need a biltong and wors drying cabinet. An enormous amount of fun was had by all the journos and bloggers attending, as we were each robed up in the most unattractive white coats and hair nets and then got down and dirty with our individual spice mixes, wine additions and sausage stuffing practice. Click here to see the photos.
We took home at least a kilo of wors each, to be dried and, because we have predators in the house (2 cats), we were unable to put them in front of a fan and dry them. So some was cooked for lunch the next day, the rest went into the freezer for another time and we came to the conclusion that we might just never buy another sausage again as it is a doddle (if a bit messy) making your own and you can control the amount of fat, filler (none for us thank you) and spice. We bought some sheep sausage skins and some basic spice mix from Freddie Hirsh and we are now set up for our future experiments. Just have to find that dryer...
URGe Urban Deli     Urge stands for Urban Rural Growers Emporium. Owners Geoff and Sean Madsen have been brave enough to have opened this new Deli situated on the corner of Buiten and Loop Streets in Town and we went to the official opening party last week. They are a convenience store, deli, wine and coffee bar and a street food kitchen. They sell basic foodstuffs, some good veg and exotica and have a bar and a food section where you can enjoy super pies, quiches, cakes and salads amongst other things - to eat there or take back to your office or home should you not care to cook that evening. They will only stock things which have been locally produced and grown. Do go and support them, we love new initiatives like this. Kind of reminds us of what we started 10 years ago.
RE:CM Ten Year Old Wine Awards     Wine writer Christian Eedes and Sponsor RE:CM hosted this very exciting dinner at the Greenhouse at the Cellars Hohenort last Thursday. It was Asset Manager RE:CM’s 10th anniversary - which was a good fit with the 10 year old wine competition. According to Piet Viljoen, executive chairman at RE:CM, the link is more than coincidental. He says that both value investing and wine-making require discipline and patience to deliver the best results. We do hope they continue their sponsorship of this very necessary competition.
Do South African wines last 10 years and longer? We think so and are finding more and more wines that impress us. There were a surprising 73 local wines entered into this competition and each entrant had to have 24 bottles of the entered wine available.  Surprising, because we did not think that many SA wines had been kept this long in vinoteque conditions. And a surprising number of the winning wines were consumed during the excellent dinner. Yes, there were some bottle variations and one or two had to be replaced, but generally the wines showed very well. See our pictures here.
We were welcomed with a glass of Villiera Monro Brut 2003. Elegant and bready with lovely goût anglais characteristics, it was still refreshing and delicious. The three winning wines served were Boekenhoutskloof Syrah 2003, Remhoogte Estate Wine 2003 and Rudera Syrah 2003.
The overall winner for us was Boekenhoutskloof Syrah 2003 and this is truly a blockbuster of a wine. Still crammed full of fruit and life and body it is probably better now than it has ever been. We think it still has time to go further. If you are lucky enough to have some, open a bottle soon.
Award winning Greenhouse Restaurant’s acclaimed chef, Peter Tempelhoff, designed courses especially to pair with each wine. The Boekenhoutskloof Syrah 2003 was served with the first course of Springbok tataki. This was followed by a Beetroot Risotto for the second course, which was paired with Rudera Syrah 2003 which went very well with the beetroot. The third course, consisting of perfectly cooked Lamb Loin and Braised Shank, was paired with Remhoogte Estate Wine 2003. Dessert was an inspiration; a molecular gastronomy nectarine foam, plum compote with chocolate candy and we were served a selection of dessert wines with this. You can read more about the awards here.
WineStyle Summer Wine Party     We were invited to a wine party and arrived after work at 5 on Friday evening to find it was a small and perfectly formed wine festival held in Simon’s Restaurant at Groot Constantia.  The festival went on over the weekend and there were some really good wines to taste. And of course we got to chat to lots and lots of great wine people. We ate some great Fish and Chips made by the restaurant, probably the best we have had in years so a return visit there is a definite sometime soon. Click here to see the photographs
Summer Chenin Showcase      We always appreciate an invitation to taste good Chenin Blancs, one of our favourite grapes, and the pinnacle is always the Chenin Blanc Growers Association Showcase. This twice a year tasting was held last Tuesday at Delaire Graff in the main restaurant and we then decamped to their restaurant Indochine for a great lunch where we could drink the chenins we had tasted that morning. Click here read more and to see the photographs.
Opening of the new Tasting room at Vondeling Wines     Vondeling wines are in the Voor Paardeberg district and you turn off just before Wellington on the R44 and head for them hills on the left. Previously the David Frost winery, Vondeling has just built a new tasting room and this was a chance to celebrate the opening with an outstanding wine party on the lawn in front of the tasting room. They are currently building a wedding chapel, so this will soon be a very good wedding venue as well. One of the drawcards of the evening was a chance to meet M. Albert Roux, one of the two esteemed brothers who own La Gavroche in London and the Riverside Inn at Bray, on the Thames just outside London. Both these restaurants have Michelin stars and the Roux Brothers are legends , having helped to raise the standard of fine dining in Britain since the 1960’s.
We were able to do a vertical tasting of Vondeling’s white blend Babiana from 2005 to 2011 vintages and we particularly enjoyed the 2008 which is at its peak right now. Lovely canapés were served throughout the evening by Food Fanatics – in fact we have seldom seen such a good supply, which never seemed to let up and all were delicious. Click here for the photographs and write up.
Stir Crazy cooking Thai food     We do regularly get invited to take part in cooking classes so that we can write about them for the schools. Often, they are no more than cooking demonstrations and, sometimes, they are more hands on, where you actually learn much more trying out different preparation and cooking methods – adding to your own skills. Last night, we attended a class at Stir Crazy and on arrival we were each given a choice of a dish we would like to cook. So we each cooked a separate dish from a recipe provided and then all the class sat down and enjoyed the food for a late supper. Two chefs Noleen van der Westhuizen and Yorke Searra were there to show us how to do things and where to find and prepare the ingredients. We had a ball and, if you want to learn this intelligent way, click here for the details. They will be doing many different and interesting courses throughout the year. People cooking last night had all sorts of different levels of cooking skills from “I’m here under sufferance, my wife made me come, to “I need to learn more”, and “I want to learn different adventurous dishes and cuisines”, so no one should feel intimidated. The recipes supplied also fit all these profiles. The first got simple rice paper rolls to make, and some of us two or three part recipes that took most of the evening to make. Click here to see the photos
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 receive 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 of Cathy’s WSET and other courses here and here and the CWA courses 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. Emma Freddi runs the Enrica Rocca cooking courses at her home in Constantia. Brett Nussey’s Stir Crazy courses are now being run from Dish Food and Social’s premises in Main Road Observatory (opposite Groote Schuur hospital).





22nd March 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.
This electronic journal has been sent to you because you have personally subscribed to it or because someone you know has asked us to send it to you or forwarded it to you themselves. Addresses given to us will not be divulged to any person or organisation. We collect them only for our own promotional purposes. We own our mailing software and keep our mailing list strictly confidential. If you wish to be added to our mailing list, please click here to send us a message and if you wish to be removed from our mailing list, please click here to send us a message.