MENU
Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet
Foods & Ingredients
Eat
In Guide’s Five time Outstanding Outlet Award Winner
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21 439 3169 / +27 83 229 1172
The view from
Kommetjie to Chapman’s Peak and the mountains round Hout Bay
In this
week’s MENU:
Horst
Frehse’s Table of Friendship at Azure Restaurant
A
Savage launch
Fancy
some Gourmet Vegetarian?
Buy
Organic in the market
Off to
see the gardens at Klein Optenhorst
Fun
with food
Dry
Rub recipe for Steak
On
Line Shop
This
week’s Product menu
Our
market activities - Neighbourgoods, Long Beach
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 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 In our Recipe this week, Lynne has used black peppercorns. We sell
wonderful, very pungent black peppercorns as well as red peppercorns and
Szechuan pepper. We have ordered more of the sensational Grains of Paradise and
will let you know when it arrives.
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,
May 4th.
Horst Frehse’s Table of Friendship at
Azure Restaurant What better way to spend a very stormy day
than to have a very gemütlich lunch at a smart hotel with a sea view, so you
can watch the storm sweep in from across the Atlantic. Last Thursday, at the
very beginning of a sensational and very early Cape storm, we drove though
sheets of rain to the Twelve Apostles Hotel at Oudekraal
to have a warm and friendly lunch at Azure with Horst Frehse, the General
Manager of the Hotel, at one of his regular Table of Friendship lunches. We
were also joined by Peter Finlayson, winemaker at Bouchard Finlayson. Lynne had some
stimulating conversation with Nils Flaatten, CEO of Wesgro, who have taken over the task
previously performed by Cape Town Routes Unlimited. As we believe we’re out
there on the cutting edge of tourism, promoting the food and wine of the Cape
in MENU, doing wine tours and working in markets where we meet many, many
different nationalities, we have opinions and positive solutions on how to
promote our beautiful city. So, thankfully, does Mr Flaatten. At John’s end of
the table were the charming Lungile Nhlanhla, the junior food editor of DRUM
magazine, and award winning wildlife photographer Daryl Balfour. We remembered Lungi as
a contestant in Masterchef SA last year. A delicious lunch was prepared by Head
Chef Michael McIntyre and we drank Bouchard Finlayson wines with each course. Click here to see the photographs.
A Savage launch Thursday
night, with the storm still raging, we drove through to Kuils River to the Langverwagt
venue for the launch of Duncan Savage’s own range of wines. Duncan is the
renowned winemaker at Cape Point Vineyards in Noordhoek
and was now ready to release his Savage wines. The function venue belongs to
members of his family and is very large and attractive. The launch was a
gathering of a large number of the great and the good of the wine world, plus
many members of Duncan’s wider family. Duncan has released two wines – there
are 5000 bottles of 2012 Savage White, which is a blend of Sauvignon Blanc and
Semillon in his classic crisp and elegant style. It has sweet fruit notes
resting on top of crisp long flavours of granadilla and lime, marmalade and
vanilla. The 2011 Savage Red is a blend of Shiraz Grenache and Cinsault and
only has 12½% alcohol. Dark toasted wood, liquorice, cinnamon and black pepper
on the nose, it is full of soft sweet red fruit with a salty liquorice and
pepper end. Even rarer there is only 3000 bottles of this first release wine so
order some now. Cellar door price of the wines is R180 per bottle, white and
red. Contact Duncan here.
We had a marvellous buffet dinner at a very long table in the old cellar. Click here to see the photographs. And
the rain held off all through the evening.
Fancy some Gourmet Vegetarian? Rhonda
Watson is a very talented vegetarian private chef, who lives in Kommetjie and
does catering in people’s homes. We met Rhonda when she was selling her wares
at Long Beach Mall market. She wanted us to taste her cooking, so invited us to
come to dinner last Friday after the market. We had a wonderful evening, as we
both like eating this sort of food very much, although we will never be
vegetarians. As a seasoned professional, she had done all her preparation
beforehand and was able to spend much of the evening eating and talking with us
while she quickly whipped up a feast. We took along a bottle of Bloemendal
Suider Terras 2009 Sauvignon blanc and it went extremely well with all the
food. If you would like her to cook some excellent vegetarian fare for you, you
can contact her on: rcwprivatechef@gmail.com Click here to see the photographs of the food and the
evening.
Buy Organic in
the market There is a new organic vegetable stand
behind us at the Biscuit Mill and it so distresses us to see that they are not
being supported by customers. Surely this is exactly what you want to buy?
Lynne has bought some great fresh peppadews from them and served these in a
curry this week. And...(she doesn’t really want to tell you about this as you
might take all of them) she has bought some superbly fresh organic farm eggs
with blindingly orange yolks. She has tasted their freshly pulped organic apple
juice and see their beautiful carrots and beetroot and preserves and bottles of
fresh vegetable soup. Come and help them stay at the Biscuit mill by buying
something from them.
Off to see the gardens at Klein
Optenhorst Klein Optenhorst wine farm in Wellington
has one of the most beautiful gardens in the Cape and, luckily, you can visit
them this weekend as they have open days on Saturday and Sunday – 9.30 to 4.30.
The R35 entrance fee will also get you homemade scones with cream and tea; 2011
Klein Optenhorst Brut Rosé will be available for sale by the glass and by the
bottle and there will be an art and pottery exhibition. They will also have a
sale of rare and unusual plants. Do let them know if you are coming, so they
can bake enough scones. We are definitely going with friends on Sunday and hope
to see lots of you there. See www.kleinoptenhorst.com/
Fun with food Lynne has
been having a lot of fun cooking in the last week. It started with the
Masterchef method to cook the perfect steak and she made the ‘dry’ rub using
onion, garlic herbs and black peppercorns blitzed with olive oil and then
applied to the steaks as far ahead, if not overnight, as possible. They were
stunningly good and we will definitely use this recipe again. She had a lot of the rub left over and so this
went into a Minestrone soup she made on Monday, which added huge amounts of
flavour. When you make minestrone, remember to cook your onions till
caramelising, then do the same with the celery, carrot and fennel. Then add the
rest of the vegetables and cook them for only half to three quarters of an
hour. Should you add tomatoes? Stock? Beans? Bacon? I think it is regional and
entirely up to you..
Rhonda Watson gave us the rest of her green Thai curry
paste, which went with cubes of beef, coconut cream and three hot peppadews
last night – not one drop was left of this curry. It is interesting to note how
Lynne finds the effects of different chillies. Some burn on the lips, others on
the front of the tongue, others at the back of the throat and others are so hot
your whole mouth is on fire. Peppadews made the mouth so hot it felt ice cold. Must
be the brain playing tricks on the palate but the effect was good. John is much
less affected – perhaps a legacy of being born in Durban.
Here is James Privit’s Masterchef recipe for you to
try yourself. We used it on 2 Rib eye steaks rather than Sirloin and halved the
recipe.
Dry Rub for Steak
2 medium onions, cut into chunks -12 cloves
garlic - 3 tablespoons rosemary, leaves picked and finely chopped - 3
tablespoons thyme, leaves picked and finely chopped - 1 tablespoon dry sage - 3
tablespoons black peppercorns -4 tablespoons olive oil - Salt to taste - 4 x
250g sirloin steak
Place onion and garlic in a food processor and process
until a mulch is formed. Transfer to a bowl.
Add rosemary, thyme and sage and combine. Using a
mortar and pestle, crush the peppercorns so that they are not a powder but
resemble a fine kibble. Add this to the marinade with the olive oil and some
salt. Mix the marinade together, forming a paste. Massage marinade into the
steaks and allow to sit covered in the fridge overnight (or at least 6 hours).
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).
24th April 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
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