The Wild Oats Farmers' Market, Sedgefield

On Saturday morning we drove through to Sedgefield to this very authentic weekly market. It is so nice to see real farm vegetables, free range poultry, plants, good bread and other tempting delights. It was very well attended and we went home with lots of goodies, including a new vegetable to us, rutabaga. We recognized it, but did not know how to cook or eat it. Luckily a German customer told us how to prepare it and she said “ you can even peel it and eat it like an apple”. She was right, it tastes just like a large crisp radish. We bought some really good camembert and baked it that evening and used the rutabaga with carrot, courgettes and tomatoes as crutidés to dip into the liquid cheese. Some will now go into soup. 

Although rain had been promised, it was a sunny (but cold) day

Rustic tables and chairs and covered stalls

Very responsible rubbish separation

This is a proper country farmers’ market, with lots of fresh produce from the local area to buy and take home to cook

Nice signage

Dried fruit piled high and some local badger friendly honey and jams

We bought the camembert on this stand - made at Ganzevlei

The very tempting (but we resisted) Ile de Pain stand with their amazing bread, sandwiches and botterkoek

A place to have a sit down or lunch

An old friend from Ferian Farm, Ferdi Rowan, selling her olives, oils and tapenades. Long ago, she sold us wonderful geese for Christmas

Just one of the fresh fruit and veg stalls. Prices are very competitive

And another old friend, Karen Shuttleworth-Dames from The Little Herb Garden, with her large range of pickles and jams.  We bought one of those enormous jars of rooikappies (pepperdews)

Lots of exceptionally good products for sale

Le Roux Charcuterie had some samples to taste

and we bought some fresh farm eggs here

And the rutabaga

Lovely spring onions

Crisp newly picked lettuce and all organic

White radishes

Another cheese stand giving samples

The crayfish tails were a little, no, much more expensive than we pay in the Cape, but he had lots of fish products to sell

Who can resist fresh juice and yoghurt

A brave statue artist that we encountered the last time we were in Knysna.  SO brave for standing still in the freezing cold, not a great way to make a living, but a living it is

There are several plant and herb stalls, and some very good indigenous plants

Braziers to keep you warm

So fresh and not expensive

Huge beetroot

and fresh leeks

Some of these parsnips came home with us

A clever idea for recycled tyres. We would like to see more of this in town.

More tempting plants. We brought home some red onion seedlings

Fresh flowers

Now this is what they call breakfast rolls

Or the full catastrophe!

Getting closer to lunch time

Only juice to go, the market doesn't have a licence for wine or alcohol or beer

The other part of the market also has lots of fruit and veg

Succulent gardens

Clothing

at The Love Shack

Hand carved items, simple but effective

Breakfast or coffee?

And a stand selling Dutch delights. Tempting, very tempting

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© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2014

140702 Main Ingredient's MENU - The Roti Indian Restaurant,Ocean Jewels fish restaurant,Oranjezicht City Farm,Egg and Tomato Custard

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A couple on Camps Bay beach watches the sunset and a choppy winter sea

In this week’s MENU:

 The Roti Indian Restaurant in Sea Point

 Ocean Jewels Fresh fish and lunchtime restaurant

 Oranjezicht City Farm

 Egg and Tomato Custard

To get the whole of our story, please click on READ ON..... at the end of each paragraph, which will lead you to our 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.

It is winter school holiday time and many of you will be taking a break and disappearing off into the wide blue or green yonder. We wish you a wonderful holiday with your families and, above all, a safe journey to and from your holiday destination.

This week’s Product menu – If you like spicy food, remember that we do stock a large range of unusual spices like Asafoetida, Allspice, green and brown Cardamom, cumin, Grains of Paradise, pink peppercorns, Shichimi togarashi, star anise and of course, northern and eastern Mediterranean favourites like, sumac, ras el hanout and za’atar – all of which we sell in 25g jars, but we can pack larger quantities if you need. We don’t stock the spices you can get in every supermarket, or fresh herbs, but if you can’t find a spice you need, please contact us to see if we have it or can get it for you......... See them here.

The Roti Indian Restaurant in Sea Point      We love to eat good Indian food and when a new place opened up in Sea Point, we headed straight there. Sadly it was Valentine’s Day and they were totally full, always a good sign. We finally got there recently and wanted to tell you about it. The Roti is on Regent Road, opposite the Sea Point Post Office. It was an estate agent’s premises and has now been converted into a fairly large and airy restaurant. They do cater for large tour buses, but the food is good and they serve authentic Indian food, not Cape Malay or Durban curries.  READ ON.....

Ocean Jewels Fresh fish and lunchtime restaurant in Woodstock     If you love fresh fish, you will know how lamentably difficult it is to find in this huge seaside city. And if you care about sustainable resources, you will want to buy and eat only green rated SASSI fish. Julie Carter sells her fish in the market at the Biscuit Mill on Saturdays, where she also cooks up some great seafood delights. But you don’t have to wait till Saturday, because Julie has a shop, Ocean Jewels in The Woodstock Exchange on Albert Road, where you can buy fish to take home and also enjoy a great lunch, as we did this week. Julie’s father and husband are also local fishermen, so you know the fish is fresh.  READ ON.....

Oranjezicht City Farm     Last Saturday was a rare one for us; we had the day off and were in town. And it was one of Cape Town’s perfect mid-winter Champagne days, bright, clear, sunny and warm. So it was our first chance to visit the Oranjezicht City Farm and Market, which is at the top of Upper Orange Street and open every Saturday from 09h00 to 14h00. To quote them: “The Oranjezicht City Farm (OZCF) is a non-profit project celebrating local food, culture and community through urban farming in Cape Town. The farm is financed primarily through the funds made at the Market Day.” Check out their web site.

This fantastic organic market garden was started and run by the local community on an old unused bowling green and historic site. On Wednesday afternoons, you can go and pick your own vegetables from the garden, as a guided self-harvest is held between 4-6 pm, weather permitting. Parking is a bit of a challenge but we got there about 11 am and found some on one of the side streets.  READ ON.....

This week’s recipe     We are eating quite a few eggs on the Banting diet, but they are starting to get a little boring. Lynne has some very old cook books in her collection and it includes a lovely book entitled How to Cook Eggs and Omelets (sic) in 300 Different Ways by C Herman Senn, O.B.E., G.C.A, F.R.H.S. It was published in 1920, nearly a hundred years ago. It is full of lovely ideas, some quaint and some mysterious, as some of the ingredients have disappeared, like loaf sugar. Would you know what Lemco or Lucullus paste was? The end section is full of wonderful sounding sweet omelettes and custards that make one’s mouth water. Lunch is an area in the Banting diet that can get boring. Lynne thought you might like to try this for lunch or for a dinner party starter. We quote directly from the book:

Egg and Tomato Custard     Break 4 eggs into a basin, beat up and add three tablespoonfuls of tomato pulp (that is, fresh ripe tomatoes rubbed through a fine sieve), one tablespoonful of cream and one tablespoonful of grated cheese. Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Butter six or seven small soufflé cases, fill them with the prepared custard, and bake them slowly in a fairly hot oven for about ten minutes. Dish up and serve quickly.

Modern methods: Lynne might use a stick blender on peeled and deseeded tomatoes or use passata. The oven temperature might be 180°C or even 190°C . We are going to try this out soon. Please report back if you liked it, or not.

Food and wine (and a few other) events for you to enjoy

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.

In addition to the new Sense of Taste Culinary Arts School, Chef Peter Ayub runs a six module course for keen home cooks at his Maitland complex. Details 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 Thursday evenings and she has decided to introduce LCHF (Banting classes). The Kitchen Confidence classes, which focus on essential cooking skills and methods, have been expanded and are now taught over 2 evenings. She continues to host private dining and culinary team building events at her home. She trained with Raymond Blanc, and has been a professional chef for 25 years. More info here

20th June 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! ^® Anti-Virus software is updated at least daily and our system is scanned continually for viruses.

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Eating Indian at The Roti, Sea Point

We love to eat good Indian food and when a new place opened up in Sea Point, we headed straight there. Sadly, it was Valentine’s Day and they were totally full, always a good sign. We finally got there recently and wanted to tell you about it. Roti is on Regent Road, opposite the Sea Point Post Office. It was an estate agent's premises and has now been converted into a fairly large and airy restaurant. They do cater for large tour buses, but the food is good and they serve authentic Indian food, not Cape Malay or Durban curries.

The entrance, with security

Plainly but tastefully decorated. 

Poppadoms come free with two dips when you sit down. Our bill for 5 dishes and 2 steamed rice came to only R400 before service. We took our own wine and were not charged corkage

We sat at the back nearer the kitchen, as it was a very cold evening. The restaurant was almost empty when we arrived at 7.30 but soon filled up. Service was polite, but a little slow as a large celebratory Indian group arrived. Perhaps a good place for an early supper.

John chose a lamb Rogan Josh – he always orders this when first visiting, as he wants to see how well they prepare it. This was a good one. Lynne originally fancied having an aubergine curry, but the one they serve is a puree rather than pieces of Aubergine. So she had a Prawn Malvani, one of their specials, which was cooked medium hot for her, even though it is normally a 3 chilli dish. It tasted authentic with a good thick sauce, but the prawns were very small and sparse for the R130 charged. We had this with a small bowl of steamed rice

Our vegetarian friends had an Aloo Mint Tikki (potato and pea fritters) as a starter, the Aubergine curry and a Dhingri Dolma (mushrooms and paneer) with steamed rice. Ronnie goes there often for lunch and is working his way through the fish and vegetarian menu.

We had not intended to have dessert, but they had cooked a huge quantity of cardamom rice pudding for the wedding party and they very kindly gave us each a bowl of it. Not to everyone’s taste, John still has bad memories of boarding school rice pudding but the rest of us enjoyed it very much. Not too sweet, creamy and beautifully fragrant from the cardamom spice

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© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2014

Lunch at Ocean Jewels, Woodstock

If you love fresh fish, you will know how lamentably difficult it can be to find in this huge seaside city. And if you care about sustainable resources, you will want to buy and eat only green rated SASSI fish. Julie Carter sells her fish in the market at the Biscuit Mill on Saturdays, where she also cooks up some great seafood delights. But you don’t have to wait till Saturday, because Julie has a shop, Ocean Jewels in The Woodstock Exchange on Albert Road, where you can buy fish to take home and also enjoy a great lunch, as we did this week. Julie’s father and husband are also local fishermen, so you know the fish is fresh

There are lots of trendy shops and businesses in this building. Parking is a small challenge

Ocean Jewels, on the ground floor of the Woodstock Exchange. For warmer weather, Julie has some outside benches. And some decorative seagulls

As many people in the area eat here regularly, Julie has quite a varied selection on the menus and she does change them often. This is one

Julie Carter, proprietor of Ocean Jewels, behind the order counter

Another chalk board menu. There are Banting options. Sweet potato chips instead of the usual wedges

The fresh fish price list and the SASSI board

Julie invited us to lunch and then produced some lovely food. One look at those crispy wedges and Banting was forgotten. This was John’s choice of the fresh angelfish with calamari combo – R50. It came with avocado slices, a spicy tartar sauce and a wedge of lemon. There are other condiments on the table

Lynne’s choice was the Salmon and Calamari combo – R70

A taster of the smoked snoek samoosas; the lightest samoosas we have had in many years, with great flavour. They are not huge parcels of doughy pastry - R5 each

The light and bright restaurant. They do not have a licence, so you could take your own wine. They sell other non alcoholic beverages, but each table has a jug of water, with slices of lemon, and glasses

This is the Angelfish taco, served with a good salad - R50

The Tuna and Calamari Combo with a salad – R60

People are very happy to share tables. We were happy to share with Linda Harding of Squashed Tomato media consultancy, whom we know, and she was having lunch with a friend, Leila Badsha, who was introducing her to Ocean Jewels

Julie with two of her staff

and the others who help to make the magic. We will definitely be back

We left with a large piece of beautiful fresh salmon

The centre is full of interesting artworks

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© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2014