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 bit of history:
Ten years ago, we closed the shop to get married
In this
week’s MENU:
On
Line Shop
This
week’s Product menu
Our
market activities - Neighbourgoods, Long Beach
Carnival
time
Ormonde
harvest in Darling
Carol
Mangiagalli Art at the Mansions
Dornier
goes Pop-up
Harvest
at The Vineyard 2
Starlight
Classics at Vergelegen
Lunch
at De Grendel
Durbanville’s
Festival of the Grape
Recipe:
Emerald and Jade fruit salad
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 Our best selling item is not imported, its locally made for us by a
Chef, Peter Ayub of Sense of Taste. It is the most excellent Prego sauce
and contains no preservatives or emulsifiers and no sugar. It is a
marvellous all purpose sauce for stir frying prawns, baking a whole fish, on
grilled chicken breasts, of course on steak rolls and Lynne even uses it to
cook long and slow dishes like Lamb shanks and oxtail.
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. Today, Friday, March 8th, we will be back at the
market in Long Beach Mall, Sun Valley, Fish Hoek.
Wey hey! It’s high summer and the weather is gorgeous.
The wind has almost stopped and those pesky clouds and drizzle have held off
this week and we have had such fun doing all the lovely things one can do
during Harvest time in the Cape. When you see what we have packed into the last
week you might gasp. And we know it will continue like this for a few weeks or
more. We love our lives. We have tried to keep MENU as short as possible this
week and put more detail into the attached blogs with the photographs.
Carnival time again After we put last week’s issue of MENU to
bed, we shot off to Wynberg for the Community Chest Carnival, for us a “must
do” annual event and a chance to support some very worthy charities. We bought
a huge pile of books from the Rotary used books tent, bought some things in the
benefiting charities tent and had the excellent obligatory Croquetten and
Grolsch beers at the Dutch stand (it’s our favourite). Later, we had awful
so-called boerewors rolls at another stand (yes we do believe there might have
been other meat products in it – goat, kangaroo, buffalo all sound too good)
and bemoaned the drop in standards of much of the food on offer and the show.
Microwaved pizzas on the Italian stand? No way. We shared another beer at the
Austrian stand but this year they didn’t have Austrian beer and it was a
reasonably good micro brew from Stellenbosch. We had thought of having the
usually excellent Austrian würstchen, but the sausages on show did not look as
good as they have been in the past. We overspent our books budget and went to
one of the Standard Bank’s two ATM vans to replenish. Neither was working and
we were told that the Standard bank was not prepared to send a technician till
the next day - Sub-Standard service. So John walked a few blocks to the Spar in
Wynberg which had the nearest working ATM. The funfair didn’t seem to be there this
year and the music everywhere was at painful pitch. The camera never left its
bag and we left quite early. The carnival is still very popular, but we really
think they have to raise their game next year, it seems to have lost its mojo.
Nothing to do? The
season of festivals and events has truly begun. If you take a look at Events
calendar (link below), you can find lots of coming events you might like to do.
Good luck to all of you taking part in the Argus Cycle Tour this weekend.
Getting involved with grapes On Thursday, we headed out to Ormonde wine farm
in Darling, where we had been invited to take part in the harvest and help them
pick some grapes. Click here to see the photos. We,
the invited media and other customers, picked a few crates of ripe Cabernet
Franc grapes along with their workers and added to their baskets. Backbreaking
work and hot in the full sun so we were relieved when the vineyard was picked
and in the trucks and it was time to on to the winery in the very bumpy staff
transporter. The workers picked on for many hours afterwards but it gave
several people a wake up as to how hard they have to work. We did a winery and
cellar tour, tasted some really wonderful fermenting grape juice, and some of
us rolled up their trousers and got foot stomping. Confession -John and I have
done this before and left it to the young folk. Modern grape presses are SO
much more efficient than the feet and its a horribly messy task. Then it was
back in the transporter to the homestead where we were rewarded with a lovely
lunch of spit roast lamb and loads of other vegetables and salads paired with
the very, very good Ormonde wines before
it was time to leave. We particularly loved their Cabernet Franc and Merlot so
some had to come home to our cellar.
And when in Darling...... how can you NOT visit Charles
Withington’s wine shop on the main street. Charles sells
all the wines of the area so if you are passing by, do stop and visit him and
you will get a very warm welcome and lots of help purchasing wines of the area.
Charles also has imported some Ginger cordial from England which we believe
people may be looking for. Contact him on 022 492 3971
Great meatings We than made a quick visit a couple of
doors down the road to the Darling butcher who has superb meat and bought a
huge belly of pork that Lynne cooked for a dinner party last night and some
huge chicken breasts. He also has good charcuterie and bacon.
Winchester Mansions and Art On our way home, we called into the
Winchester Mansions where art dealer Penny Dobbie had invited us to the opening
of her exhibition of Carol Mangiagalli’s paintings. We
love her lively and colourful primitive art and the exhibition will continue
for a while. Click here for details. Her
charming picture of Winchester Mansions has been bought by the hotel and will
make a superb centrepiece statement.
Dornier goes Pop-up We popped into town on Friday evening to see what Dornier were doing at the Merchants Café at 33 Long Street.
Pop-up restaurants are becoming all the rage here suddenly, following their
popularity in America and Europe. It gave Dornier a chance to showcase their
wines, some tapas prepared by their talented chef Neil Norman and get to know a
completely new crowd on Friday and Saturday evening. Click here to see the photos.
Apparently they will be doing this again in the winter. Watch this space.
Final wining in the Vineyard We wrote, a couple of weeks ago, about the
first wine harvest in Newlands in 150 years, which took place in the Vineyard
Hotel’s little vineyard on the bank of the Liesbeek River. The harvest had been
scheduled for a date better suited to
most peoples’ diaries, but the grapes wouldn’t wait. On Saturday morning,
having unloaded our merchandise at the Neighbour goods Market and helped her
set up, John returned to the Vineyard for the “official” harvest, where the
last few bunches were picked with great celebration by some of the
representatives of farms who had sponsored and planted the vineyard. Some of
these farms were up to their necks in their own harvests, but Warwick’s
doyenne, Norma Ratcliffe, did her duty with great style. More here.... After the
market at the Biscuit Mill, we headed off to Vergelegen for the marvellous
RMB Starlight Classics concert, to which we were delighted
to have been invited again. This is probably one of the highlights of our
musical year and this year was no exception. Vergelegen is a magic place and
the concert is held in the gardens in front of the Camphor trees. This year
they featured amongst others Lira, opera divas Angela Kerrison and Sarah-Jane
Brandon, the PJ Twins, Cape Town Opera Chorus and and it was all amusingly and
brilliantly conducted by the redoubtable
Richard Cock. Armed by the organisers with a full picnic bag, Vergelegen wine,
chairs and polar fleece blankets (just in case) what more could anyone want. See the photos here
And then...? (as we said to a friend, this week was
INSANE) We didn’t feel tired until we came to write MENU, then it hit us how much we
have done.
Doing it in Durbanville On Sunday, we were off to Durbanville, where we had
been invited to have lunch in the restaurant at De
Grendel. We think this restaurant needs much more
investigation - the food was terrific and we
certainly need to go again, and probably again... very talented chef. And of
course lovely faultless wines made by Charles Hopkins, another extremely
talented winemaker.
Then it was off to the Festival of the Grape held at
the Durbanville Race Course over the weekend. We had a blast and have given you
a detailed report on the blog. Just click here.
This week’s recipe is a reprint of one Lynne
invented several years ago. We had a dinner party last night and she made this
again. There is quite a short season when green melons and grapes are in season
together and it is now. Do try this, it is lovely and fresh. She served this
with a green lime jelly made with a bottle of gewürztraminer on which she
floated some tiny basil leaves.
EMERALD AND JADE FRUIT SALAD
2-3 green kiwi fruit - a green
fleshed melon - 200g green seedless grapes - 2 green skinned ripe pears – 20
small mint leaves - angelica or green glace cherries
For the syrup: 2 limes - 285 ml water - 175g caster sugar
- 150 ml dry white wine: Chenin Blanc, Semillon, Gewürztraminer, unwooded
Chardonnay or, the best, Viognier
Make the syrup by adding the juice and grated rind and
juice of one lime to the water, wine and sugar and simmering for 5 minutes.
Cool, then add to the salad.
2 - 3 hours before serving, peel, core and slice up
the pear leaving the skin on. Place in a deep glass bowl. Pour over the juice
of the second lime. Peel and slice the kiwi. Halve the melon, remove the seeds
and make balls with a melon-baller or cut into 2 cm cubes or triangles. Cut the
grapes in half.. Put all into bowl and mix very gently. Add the mint leaves
Pour on the syrup. Cut the angelica/cherries into small diamond shapes and
sprinkle onto the salad. Chill.
You can also serve this with pistachio ice-cream or a
kiwi and lime sorbet.
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).
7th 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! ®
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continually for viruses.
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