Wednesday, April 05, 2017

This Week's MENU. Winery Road's 21st Birthday , Paul Cluver Family Day, Sundowners with the Wallaces, Black pepper Chicken with vegetables, Black Dog Malbec

Tall, straight trees. Reaching to the sky. Paul Cluver Estate,Elgin
A week of starting to enjoy a new car with more toys than we ever imagined could exist in a vehicle. We enjoyed driving it to Stellenbosch and to Elgin for the events you can read about here. We miss the space we had in our old, much bigger, chariot, but we won’t miss the bills...

Tracy van Maaren continues to expand her list with excellent wines, which makes this trade tasting exciting each year. Chef Proprietor of Aubergine and Auslese, Harald Bresselschmidt, arranges food pairings for some of these wines and they are interesting matches which make one think about how you would serve these wines. This was held on Wednesday last week (Read On....)
As we discussed during the lunch held last week, there are not many successful restaurants who can claim to have survived this long under the same owners. 96 Winery Road certainly fits the bill. Partners Ken and Allan Forrester, Martin Meinert and chef Natasha Wray are still involved and the restaurant continues to provide superb food. At the celebration we tasted the all time favourites from their menu over the last 21 years, paired with some of the great Forrester Meinert wines (Read On....)
A Harvest festival of different sort, Paul Cluver organised a train to take families from Cape Town to and from the farm last Saturday for the fun day out, held in the Amphitheatre. We arrived under our own steam (pun intended) just as the train arrived and a very jolly day was had by all (Read On....)
We had booked an Airbnb for the night in Elgin following the Festival at Paul Cluver and made a stop at Wallowvale to visit our friends Nicky and Paul Wallace and watch the sun go down while tasting their wines, exchanging trade gossip and making a fuss of the black dogs and the terrier     (Read On....)

Lynne uses strips of bite sized thigh meat in this stir fry, but a mix of breast and leg meat will also be fine. You can use any vegetables that are suitable for a quick stir fry like those below or add broccoli, sweet corn, mange tout, mushrooms, etc. You need about four cups. You can use coconut oil for frying if you don't have peanut. Peanut oil can take a very high heat which makes it suitable for stir frying. Never use olive oil, it laminates and turns to plastic which is very bad for you.
350 g chicken cut into 5 cm strips - 1 T corn flour - 1 tsp light soy - 1 tsp Shaoxing rice wine or dry sherry - 1 garlic clove, grated - 1.5 cm knob of fresh ginger, grated - 2 T peanut oil for frying - selection of fresh vegetables, see below - ½ an onion, roughly chopped - ½ cup of fresh bean sprouts - 4 spring onions, sliced
Stir fry sauce: 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper, according to your taste - 2 Tbspns oyster sauce - 2 tsp light soy sauce - 2 tsp Shaoxing rice wine or dry sherry - 1/2 t sesame oil - 1 tsp honey - salt
Preparation
Stir the corn flour, the light soy and rice wine into the chicken, mix well and set aside for at least half an hour. This flavours and tenderised the chicken. This is known as velveting the chicken to tenderise it. Make the stir fry sauce and set aside for use later
Vegetables: Cut these into bite size pieces: half a red pepper - half a green pepper - 2 small carrots - 1 courgette - 1 stick of celery - 10 green beans - 1/4 of a Chinese cabbage, roughly chopped
Heat your wok and when hot put in the oil. Just before it begins to smoke, quickly add the rough cut onion and stir for a minute. Add the garlic and ginger, stir then immediately add the chicken and brown quickly on all sides. Add all the chopped vegetables and mix quickly to stir fry for a minute or two. Add the sauce and stir well. Cook till it starts to bubble. Fry for about three or four minutes till the chicken is cooked and the cabbage is beginning to wilt. Add the bean sprouts at the end and quickly stir them in. Top with the spring onions and serve from the wok with noodles or rice. Taste and add salt if needed

This wine has really come into its own and is drinking so well at the moment. It has green herbs, black cherries, and vanilla oak on the savoury nose. Supple and soft on the palate with dark berry fruit, salty liquorice and soy. It's a wine for fine foods or just to quaff with friends over supper. And it goes beautifully with chilli and dark chocolate

5th April 2017
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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 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. This electronic journal has been sent to you because you have personally subscribed to it or because someone you know has asked us to send it to you or forwarded it to you themselves. Addresses given to us will not be divulged to any person or organisation. We collect them only for our own promotional purposes. If you wish to be added to our mailing list, please click here to send us a message and if you wish to be removed from our mailing list, please click here to send us a message.

© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2017

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