MENU
Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet
Foods & Ingredients
Eat
In Guide’s Outstanding Outlet Award Winner from 2006 to 2010
+27
21 439 3169 / +27 83 229 1172
Setting sun over Noordhoek Beach – our
farewell to the market at Cape Point Vineyards
In this
week’s MENU:
On
Line Shop
This
week’s Product menu
Our
market activities - Neighbourgoods, Long Beach, no more Cape Point Vineyards
Vegetarian
eating
Local
and lekker
Recipe:
Mediterranean Smoked Pork, Tomato and Cannellini Beans
Masterchef
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. We’ve had do a bit of
detective work to identify anonymous payments. Use the form on the website to
email us your order and we will send you the final invoice. Click here to see the shop.
This week’s Product menu Exotic spices (especially
those from the Mediterranean) are flavour of the month, it seems, and we are
selling lots of sumac, za’atar, ras el hanout, baharat and saffron.
Prego sauce is back in stock, so the fans who were
disappointed after we ran out can enjoy it again.
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.
Tomorrow,
Friday 25th,
you will find us in the market at Long Beach Mall once again
CAPE POINT VINEYARDS MARKET Sadly, we decided last week that we can no
longer work at this very vibrant and busy market, because most of the people
coming to the market are there simply to eat and drink from the wonderful
selection provided for them and most are not shopping. You will notice that
there are now only one or two traders selling anything other than prepared food
to consume there. Our return travel distance is quite long and when we did our
calculations for the 8 weeks we worked at the market, we actually made a small
loss. However, if you live in the area, you will continue to find us at the
Long Beach Mall market every second Friday from 9 am to 4pm, selling our large
range of unusual and difficult to find ingredients.
You can of course also check out our web page and our
on line shop: http://www.mainingredient.biz/main-ingredients-online-store.php
Our on-line shop is working very well and orders are
growing every day so if you need something, think about going this route but do
factor in delivery charges. We are very happy to post to anywhere in South
Africa. Delivery in Sea Point, Green Point, Camps Bay and the CBD is free, but
we do impose a small charge for the rest of the Peninsula. A couple of people
commented last week that the links didn’t work. We tried them several times, on
different computers, and had no trouble, so we hope you can open them today.
Vegetarian eating We are not vegetarian, but we do love
eating good vegetarian food. Several of our friends are. We just wanted to tell
you of a very simple meal we had with two of them this week. Loraine prepared a
dish of simple roasted and raw vegetables, a chickpea and brinjal dish, pickles,
a tuna dip and humus. She made an enormous wholemeal loaf, some crisp melba
toast and added a ciabatta. The meal was superb and we finished it off with a
dish of the wonderful array of fresh fruit that is in season – grapes, pawpaw,
cherries, litchis, mango and nectarines. This was washed down with good local
wine and we had a great time. If you choose the freshest and best ingredients
and you prepare them the best way you can, you can feast like kings.
Local and Lekker Do you have a local restaurant that you visit
often? We are extremely fortunate in Sea Point to have four that we love but the
one we probably patronise the most is our local Chinese, Dynasty, which is in
Nedbank Centre, above our old shop on the corner of Kloof and Irwinton Roads. The
quality of their sushi is exceptional, although as everywhere, prices have had
to creep up. But they also produce a huge range of other Chinese dishes,
including some dumplings and dim sum. Do try their current chef’s special of a
crispy duck salad. You get an enormous portion, covered in duck, avocado,
tomatoes, lettuce and cucumber and dressed with a sweet chilli dressing and a
sushi mayonnaise. Their ducks are imported from Thailand because, like us, they
find local ducks to be too scrawny.
Lynne made the mistake of ordering some sushi recently
at another of our favourite local haunts, the excellent Ocean Basket, and it
was horrible; the rice was so cludgy and sticky she had to discard most of it. To
their credit, they did offer to replace the dish but by then Lynne had eaten
most of her small starter. But we do find their fish and seafood is always
fresh and well cooked.
Our other local favourites are La Mouette, for an
elegant meal in a lovely old house (even if the reconstruction of the Checkers
building is creating a lot of nuisance –and their seasonal special is a
bargain) and La Bohème, our best local bistro for affordable, well-cooked food
with a good, well-priced wine list.
This next dish is a perfect summer one-pot supper,
full of the flavours of the Mediterranean. The beans and tomatoes will cook
down and start to thicken the dish, the potatoes and the lean smoked pork will
add the substance and the herbs and smoked paprika add the final notes. Do not
season until the end as the pork can be quite salty on its own. The wine to
serve with this is a light red like a Valpolicella and do serve it chilled from
the fridge. We didn’t have a Valpolicella, so enjoyed it with De Toren’s La Jeunesse Delicat, a light and
young Bordeaux blend (made in more of a Beaujolais style) which should be
served slightly chilled. Grangehurst Cape Rosé Blend
would also be a good choice as it is quite a “serious” rosé, made from Cabernet
Sauvignon, Pinotage, Merlot, Chenin Blanc and Shiraz - somewhere between a rosé
and a light red.
Mediterranean
Smoked Pork, Tomato and Cannellini Beans
Small onion, finely chopped - 1
T olive oil - 3 cloves garlic crushed – 200 ml dry white wine – tin of drained
cannellini beans - tin of chopped tomatoes – a good handful of mixed fresh
herbs finely chopped: parsley, basil , oregano, thyme– 6 Kassler chops, trimmed
and halved - 5 potatoes peeled and chopped into quarters – 1 t smoked Spanish
paprika - ½ t Tabasco sauce – freshly ground black pepper and salt to taste – 1
t sugar
Fry the onion in the oil until it is just starting to
take on colour, add the garlic and stir for one minute to cook. Add the white
wine and reduce down to half. Pour in the cannellini beans, the tomatoes, the
herbs, paprika, Tabasco and the Kassler chops. Stir and leave to simmer for
half an hour. Add the potatoes and if necessary a little extra liquid like
vegetable stock. Simmer until the potatoes are done. Taste and season and add
the sugar if the tomatoes have made the dish a little tart. Serve with steamed
green vegetables or a fresh mixed green salad. Serves four.
MASTERCHEF With
the very good and intense British season just over, now we have two more to
watch. Lynne is finding she has to watch the Australian Masterchef season in the
morning in order to keep abreast of what is happening – they are certainly
putting the early contestants through their paces. The Maggie Beer elimination
challenge was at a level far above most of those poor aspiring cooks.
Apparently there will be 85 instalments in this series
– would that SA television had this sort of budget at its disposal. Ours will
only be about a quarter of that. Then, in the afternoons, there is the UK
Masterchef Professionals where the level of cooking so far has been abysmal –
none of them could even truss a chicken. And there was mention of a new season
of Junior Masterchef coming soon.
Our own Masterchef is currently being filmed in Paarl
for showing later in the year and, of course, there have been the two series
from the USA: Top Chef Masters and Top Chef Desserts. Our PVR is getting
crammed with all this delight and John is extremely thankful that we now have
another one where he can store his sport, history and natural history
favourites. If any of you watched Top Chef Masters series 3 you might be
interested to hear that Lynne spotted and talked to one of the three finalists,
Traci Des Jardins of Jardinière restaurant in San
Francisco, at the Biscuit Mill. She was here for a three week holiday. We gave
her several recommendations of where to eat while she was in the Cape.
And now Nigellissima has started....
NB: Just remember when they use
an ingredient on TV that you have never heard of and don’t know where to find,
contact us, we probably have it or we will know where to find it.
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 have had 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 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.
23rd January 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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