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

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Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal

Gourmet Foods & Ingredients

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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

 Food and wine (and a few other) events for you to enjoy

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.

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