Evening on
Milnerton lagoon
In
this week’s MENU:
This
week’s products: SE Asian summer ingredients This week’s recipe: Summer Plum and Cinnamon Tart Learn about wine
and cooking
We write about
our experiences in MENU, not only to entertain you, but to encourage you to
visit the places and events that we do. We know you will enjoy them and we try
to make each write up as graphic as we can, so you get a good picture of what
is on offer at each place, restaurant, wine farm, festival we visit.
To get the whole of our story, please click on
“READ
ON.....” at the end of each paragraph, which will
lead you to the related blog, with pictures and more words. At the end of each
blog, click on RETURN
TO MENU to come back to the blog version of MENU.
This week’s Product menu South east Asian recipes
are perfect for our summer, light and zingy Some of the ingredients are hot,
other quite pungent, like shrimp paste, ketjap manis and fish sauce. Find them here
This week we have had a chance
to review two new restaurants, attend a summer wine festival and taste a newly
released Chenin Blanc
Volare, Oh Oh Oh Peddlars on the Bend has been a well visited
pub in Constantia for years. It has now been acquired by Chef Brad Ball (who is
also the CEO) and partners Steve and Rob Fleck and has been renamed Peddlars &
Co. Their new upmarket Italian themed restaurant Volare has recently opened and
we were invited to visit and dine last Friday evening. Soon there will be four
venues on the property: Volare, The Local - a bar serving craft beers and
platters, The Oak Terrace offering Al Fresco dining and Graciales offering
small delicious plates for sharing Read on
Franschhoek
Summer Wines This summer festival allows
the Franschhoek wine farms to show their best white wines for summer drinking
and it is a lovely relaxed event held at Leopards Leap on the lawn. Food is
available in the restaurant, there was live music and, on a perfect Saturday,
lots of people were having a lot of fun in the sun. Read On
Bertus Basson at
Spice Route The Mining Indaba has been
filling Cape Town this last week and it was hard to get a reservation at our
favourite restaurants as they were heavily booked, so this gave us a chance to
go to this new restaurant, which has only been open for a few days. Bertus
Basson is one of our top chefs, a man with a wild child reputation for fun and
interesting gourmet food, so we were keen to see what he is doing there. It has
a South African traditional food theme running through the menu, but with lots
of twists and surprises, as we would expect from Bertus, who deconstructs and
enhances and uses the best fresh ingredients. At last there is a place to
introduce your guests to traditional South African dishes with good wine. And
of course there are a lot of other things to do on Spice Route. Read On
After Lunch we visited Red Hot
Glass, de Villiers Chocolate and Cape Brewing Company on Spice Route. See them here
Black Pearl As we were in the Agter Paarl area for
lunch we decided to visit this farm on the A44. We used to sell their wines
when we had our wine shop but had never been to the farm to see the Nash
family. Read on
Jordan Harvest
lunch and the release of their 2014 Chenin Blanc Phylloxera is a tiny destructive louse,
native to America, which preys on and destroys the roots of grape vines. It was
accidentally introduced to France in the 1860’s, spread rapidly and devastated
the vines there and in the rest of Europe and they all had to be replanted. It
also made its way to South Africa on vine root stocks and caused major
devastation. It is the reason that all vines in most of the world have to be
planted on American root stocks which are immune to it. It was discovered in
Mowbray in the Cape in 1886 by a French scientist, Dr
Louis Albert Peringuey. He was an Insect taxonomist who
became Inspector-general of vineyards in the Cape. Jordan wines have honoured
him by naming their newly released 2014 Chenin Blanc after him and we were
invited to their Harvest lunch to taste it. Read on.
This week’s
recipe is a Summer Plum and Cinnamon Tart. Do not use prune plums, but
nice juicy plums which are in season at the moment.
A roll of Flaky
pastry – 10 sweet plums – 60 g sugar - ½ t of ground cinnamon - T 2 water – 1 T
butter – 2 T corn flour – a pinch of salt – vanilla extract or almond extract -
juice of half a lemon
Turn your oven to 190°C.
Grease a 22 cm deep pie dish and roll out two circles of pastry. Line the dish
with the bottom layer of pastry and put into the fridge to rest, together with
the rest of the pastry.
Halve the plums, remove the
pips and put the plums into a pan with the cinnamon, sugar, butter and water.
Cook until the plums are beginning to soften. Taste and adjust the sweetness or
add the lemon juice if the plums are very sweet. Add half a teaspoon of either
the vanilla extract or the almond extract according to your taste and the pinch
of salt. Remove a couple of tablespoons of the juice and stir in the corn flour
then stir it back into the plums. This will prevent the juice from being too
liquid when the pie is cooked. You can also use tapioca flour. Set aside to
cool.
Fill the pie dish with the
plum mixture, cover with the other circle of pastry. Crimp and seal the edges
with well beaten egg, decorate the top with pastry trimmings and glaze with the
beaten egg and some sugar. Place on a metal tray to avoid spills. Bake for 50
minutes or until the pastry is crisp and golden. Allow to cool for a while
before you slice. Serve with whipped cream.
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
The Hurst Campus, an accredited school for people who want to become
professional chefs, has a variety of courses. See the details here
Chez Gourmet in Claremont has a programme of cooking classes. A calendar of their classes can be seen here.
In addition to the
new Sense
of Taste Culinary Arts School, Chef Peter Ayub runs a
four module course for keen home cooks at his Maitland complex. Details
here
Nadège Lepoittevin-Dasse has French cooking classes in Noordhoek
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.
12th February 2015
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.
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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
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