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

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Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal

Gourmet Foods & Ingredients

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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.

 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).

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.

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