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Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet
Foods & Ingredients
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In
this week’s MENU:
Bosman Family
Vineyards Durbanville
Feast of the Grape Fish curry
This week’s Product menu - We carry a small
range of Oriental pastes like Tamarind, Sambal Olek and Tom Yum. These make
cooking very easy when you want to be adventurous. We also stock Shao Xing rice
wine, Mirin (sweet Japanese rice vinegar) and black rice if you are a keen
Asian cook. Lynne has used Tamarind in this week’s recipe below.
If you can find it in the
supermarket, we don't usually stock it, just the products you would struggle to
find... Check our online shop to see more details and prices.
Bosman Family Vineyards It is not often that we get to see
experimental vines being grown, so it was with great interest that we accepted
an invitation to go to see these vineyards in Hemel and Aarde valley where they
grow different varieties of grapes and several different clones of each. Click here to read about these vines and to see the photographs of the day
Durbanville Feast of the Grape This superb wine festival will be held on
one farm only this year, so head for D'Aria Farm on the 1st and 2nd of March.
We will be there on Sunday 2nd and hope to see lots of you. After all, it is
only half an hour from town and you can join in the celebration of the harvest.
You will be able to sample lots of wines and good foods. Click here for their link to the festival showing you how
you can book.
On Tuesday, we attended the
Media launch of the festival and had a wonderful time helping to pick grapes,
as the Durbanville Wine Valley is making a special wine which contains grapes
from each of the 12 farms involved. Click here to read about this and our great day out.
Fish curry
If you are like us, you might
find that in very hot weather (and it has been awfully hot in Cape Town this
week) a curry helps to cool you down. This week’s recipe is a very quick fish
curry. You make the sauce and then you put in the fish for the last four
minutes and serve with rice. It could not be simpler in this hot weather when
none of us want to be slaving over a hot stove. Lynne did a very silly thing on
Sunday and roasted a chicken for supper. We won’t do that again in a heat wave
when the temperature was in the 40’s. You can also use prawns or other seafood
in this curry, but fish is the best, as it takes on so much flavour from the sauce.
You can make it as hot as you care for by adjusting the amount of fresh chilli.
Because of the Tamarind, it makes a sour and savoury curry. We used hake, but kingklip,
monk fish or any of your favourites will work well.
1 kg of firm white fish – 2 t
turmeric powder 2 onions, sliced – 2 cloves of garlic, crushed – 1 T peanut or
canola oil – salt - 2 t turmeric powder– 1 t cumin power – 2 to 3 T Indian
curry paste – 1 tin of coconut milk - ½
litre fish stock - 2 red chillies, sliced – 1 or 2 T tamarind paste – 2 t fish
sauce
Cut the fish into bite sized
cubes and rub with 2 t of turmeric powder. Put into the fridge until you are
ready to serve supper.
Chop the onions into half moon
slices, chop the garlic finely and fry them both gently with a little salt in
oil till soft and sticky but not brown. Add two teaspoons of turmeric and one
of cumin. Add 2 tablespoons of your favourite Indian curry paste (do not use
Thai or Malaysian). Fry for a minute to develop the spices, then pour on the
coconut milk and half a litre of good fish stock. Add the chillies and a
tablespoon of sour tamarind paste and two teaspoons of fish sauce. Add
vegetables at this point, if you are want them. Beans, mange tout and red
peppers add volume, vitamins and colour. Simmer for about 10 minutes. Taste and
adjust seasoning. This should be quite hot and also sour so, if it is not, add
more tamarind paste. The fish sauce will add the salt. When you are ready to
eat, add the fish pieces to the hot curry sauce and simmer until just cooked
and serve with fluffy steamed basmati rice.
Lovely with sweet mango chutney.
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. Karen Glanfield has taken
over the UnWined
wine appreciation courses from Cathy. See the details 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
20th 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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