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In
this week’s MENU:
Being Green Breedekloof
Dinner at Cullinan Hotel Stellenbosch Wine Festival Cape Talk’s Bandstand Boogaloo This week’s recipe:
Fresh Tomato and Basil Soup
Change
in the way we present MENU Thank
you to all who gave us feedback about the way we are presenting MENU. One pertinent comment was that it was not easy to go back
to MENU after reading one of the blogs. We have inserted a "Return to
MENU" link at the bottom of each of the related story blogs and it will
take you back to the blog version of MENU
This week’s Product menu - Our product of the
week is Protea Hill Farm's Balsamic Raspberry vinegar, which is an essential
ingredient for this week’s soup. It comes from Stellenbosch, is completely
organically grown and made and you can have a two year old for R90 or a
balsamic which has been matured in a barrel for more than 10 years for R150 for
250ml. If you don’t want to use this, we can sell you a very good Italian red
wine vinegar for R30 a bottle. There is also white wine vinegar in our range
and several French vinegars and Spanish sherry vinegars. Check our online shop to see more details and prices.
This has been a week of very large events and some awful heat. We measured
43.5ºC when we left the Stellenbosch Wine Festival at about 3pm on Friday and
our car thermometer read 45ºC as we parked under a tree outside our house in
upper Sea Point on getting home. We always thought Stellenbosch would be hotter
than Sea Point!
Being Green We
are busy putting up sun foil in our sea facing windows (Our house, built in
1924, is called Sunkissed) and it is making a lot of difference with internal
house temperatures. We hope this also helps to keep the warmth in next winter
as we heat our house only using our wood burning stove and we hate to think we
are also contributing to global warming by heating some of Sea Point and
surrounds.
Breedekloof Dinner at Cullinan Hotel We have come to appreciate some of the
wines of this area since our visit to Slanghoek in December Slanghoek is a ward
of this wine district. We must confess that the wine we tasted at this function
last year was not universally good so click here to see if we have changed our opinions of it
and the food we were served
Stellenbosch Wine Festival This was held over the last weekend and we do
hope many of you ventured out there despite the heat. Luckily Saturday and
Sunday were much cooler. We were invited to the media launch at 11 so click here to see what we experienced.
Cape Talk Radio’s Bandstand Boogaloo at Greenways
Hotel This wonderful outdoor music
event was held last Saturday night and we had a great deal of fun. If you wish you had gone or want to attend another of
their events in future, read here
This week’s recipe:
Fresh Tomato and Basil Soup
When the weather is hot, one does not want to eat a lot and a cold fresh
soup often makes life bearable. They are usually very easy to make using in a
blender or food processor and often don’t require any cooking
We have a lot of basil growing in our vertical garden and some nice
tomatoes. This is nearly all you need to make a really lovely summer soup very
quickly.
1/3 cup of basil – 250 ml good
extra virgin olive oil - 2 kg of really ripe tomatoes – a large clove of garlic
- 1 T of Protea Hill Farm raspberry vinegar (or red wine vinegar) – Salt &
freshly ground black pepper - Optional one or two teaspoons of sugar
Blitz the fresh basil with the
olive oil and leave in the fridge till you need it.
Cut a small cross in each of the tomatoes using a very sharp knife. Put
them into a large bowl (you may have to do two batches according to how large
your tomatoes are) and cover with boiling water. Leave for 3 to 4 minutes, then
drain and plunge them into ice cold water. This will make them easy to peel. Peel
them and roughly chop. Remove the core if it is large.
If you want to leave the skins on,
begin here. The soup will be a little more grainy.
Put the tomatoes into a blender or food processor and blitz with the
peeled garlic clove until smooth. You can also do this in batches. Add salt and
pepper and the Raspberry or red wine vinegar to the puree. Taste and adjust
seasoning. If your tomatoes were not completely ripe, you might want to add a
little sugar at this stage.
Serve chilled in large bowls and then drizzle a circle of green basil
oil on the top of each bowl. Enjoy with crusty bread. If you want to spice this
up, add a fresh chilli. If you want it creamy, add some ripe avocado.
Wines we
enjoyed this week Most
of the wines we have tasted this week have been at the various tastings we have
attended. Undoubtedly, the best has been the 5 star Opstal Carl Everson Chenin,
more about which in the Breedekloof story above. Our wine club had a tasting
last night in which South African and comparable International wines were
tasted in the appropriate Riedel glasses, but time constraints mean that we
will give you details next week. Wines of note at the Stellenbosch Festival
were the Ken Forrester Reserve Chenin, very close in quality to his famed FMC
at a far more affordable price, Idiom's Merlot Pinotage Cabernet Petit Verdot
blend (that's what they call it) and Journey's End Destination Chardonnay, a
big wine with a good balance of wood and fruit, which will be a good
accompaniment to a dish like pan-fried pork cutlets. At home, we have enjoyed
Babylon's Peak Shiraz Carignan 2009, which we ordered from the farm after it
won a double gold (best Rhône-style blend) at the 2011 Veritas show. Price then
a remarkable R45 per bottle. It has a lovely blend of fruit and spice, with a
bone-dry but savoury finish
Buying from us On Line 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 on line shop. We can send your requirements
to you anywhere in South Africa. Please do not pay until we have confirmed availability and
invoiced you, then you pay and then we deliver or post. 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. Click here to see our OnLine Shop.
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. Events outside the Western Cape are listed here.
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. 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).
Lynn Angel runs the Kitchen Angel
cooking school and does private dinners at her home. She holds hands-on cooking
classes for small groups on Monday and Wednesday evenings. She trained with
Raymond Blanc, and has been a professional chef for 25 years. More info here
6th February 2014
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 online shop 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 and standard 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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