Lunch at Jardine on Jordan

Jordan Restaurant with George Jardine

The menu changes very often as they cook seasonally and use as much local produce as they can obtain. This was what we ate on Sunday 30th December 2012

Flash fried Blesbok liver, thinly sliced with crisp fried sage leaves, pancetta, apricots and mash on radish slices

Beautiful buttery pastry leek tart with truffle and watercress

Classic duck and cherries with a marvellous jus and cape gooseberries (physallis) and baby beets. The leg had been crusted with polenta.

Moist and succulent gurnard in a smoked tomato sauce topped with home-made linguine and sprinkled with basil and parmesan. Who says cheese doesn't go with pasta? This was an excellent dish with loads of smoky tomato flavour

Herb crusted tender Chalmar beef on a classic creamy risotto with the best beef jus we have both tasted in years.  George Jardine is renowned for his spectacular sauces and jus.

One of the beautiful views from Jordan of their vineyards and others in the valley

Jordan wines are available by the glass

Looking down Stellenbosch Kloof from the restaurant's terrace

 George plates a dish under the watchful eye of Louise, his wife

The elegant, quiet and cool tasting room at De Morgenzon, next door to Jordan

Midsummer vines, green after the wet winter and covered in bunches of grapes, still ripening

Wonderul contrasts of Canna lilies, olive trees and vines on De Morgenzon

The outside of the De Morgenzon tasting room

© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2013

Lunch at Paulina's, Rickety Bridge in Franschhoek

Rickety Bridge in Franschhoek, nestled under its hill with the vineyards before it

The sunny restaurant terrace with good cover for a hot day – do specify when you book if you want to eat inside or out. The koi pond is a cooling feature.

Lynne studies the menu

Lounge area on the terrace where they were preparing for a wedding

Our favourite choice of the day was the Cape Malay curry with rice and sambals, one of which tasted like Mrs Balls chutney. It contained Prawns and chicken which is more normal for a Durban curry but the sauce was pure Cape curry, spicy without being too hot and with loads of turmeric

The extensive menu

The good wine and beverage list

Seafood risotto, with slightly al dente rice

Spanish style very spicy calamari with chorizo was flash cooked and with the calamari slightly underdone.  This was served with a coriander dressing. The deep fried capers were a very good addition.

Crisp belly of pork with a good chilli ginger jam, wasabi mash and excellent crisp shredded vegetables.

The chocolate plate contained a sliver of chocolate tart, white chocolate mousse, a chocolate brownie, and a scoop of very, very good chocolate ice-cream

The pudding plate had a malva pudding, a bread and butter pudding and a sticky toffee pudding. The banana custard ice-cream was finished so they substituted a commercial vanilla ice-cream.

We were treated to a small glass of their dessert wine, Rickety Bridge Natural Sweet Chenin Blanc 2010

Our waiter Jeremiah

Preparing the function room for a wedding

Inside the restaurant

Inside the wine shop/tasting room ...

...service was busy

And the decor is fun

They have some good promotional merchandise

Another part of the venue is the outdoor wine tasting area, almost in the vines

Content © John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus cc 2013

20 December 2012 Main Ingredient's MENU - On Line Shop, holidays, Kirstenbosch carols, Waterkloof MW dinner

MENU

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South Africa's national flower, a young Protea cynaroides, the King Protea

In this week’s MENU:

       On Line Shop
       This week’s Product menu   
       Our market activities
       Holidays
       Kirstenbosch carols
       Cees van Casteren MW dinner at Waterkloof
       and a wonderful Christmas and New Year to all
       Wine and Food Events in 2012 & 2013
       Wine courses & cooking classes

To take a look at our Main Ingredient blogs, follow the link: http://adamastorbacchus.blogspot.com/ because to tell our whole story here would take too much space and you can also read earlier blogs. We are constantly surprised at how many of the older blogs are still being read. Google Analytics tells us how many people are reading them and where they are. There is something special about seeing that our ramblings are being read in China or South Korea. Readers in Europe, The UK and North America are a good percentage, but the surprise always comes from the countries outside our normal reach. Click on underlined and Bold words in the text of this edition to open links to pictures, blogs, pertinent websites or more information. Follow us on Twitter: @mainingmenu

Main Ingredient's On Line Shop is performing very well. We are continuing to update it with new products and with photographs of products. E had a small glitch when we removed our bank details and this prevented a few of you from placing an order. We have corrected this, but - Do not pay until we have confirmed availability and invoiced you. Use the form on the website to email us your order and we will send you the final invoice.   Click here to see the shop.

This week’s Product menu    Christmas treats are the order of the day: Lynne's puds and cakes, chestnuts, sweet and savoury, patés, mustards and all sorts of other delicacies. If you want something delicious for your Christmas dinner without having to spend the day slaving in a hot kitchen, our cans of confit duck will save you effort and give you a meal to remember. Check them in our online shop. We have also had orders for other delicacies, which we can provide frozen to special order, such as frozen croissants (case lots only), scallops and frogs' legs.

Fresh truffles are still available to special order. We need to know your requirement as soon as possible after you receive this, so that we can quote you and receive your payment in time to send your order to the supplier. Burgundy is the most affordable and orders must be in multiples of 50 grams. The truffles will be airfreighted. We can source white truffles from Alba and black truffles from Perigord but the price is significantly higher. Send us a message if you wish to order.

Christmas cometh whatever we may do....     Lynne has been baking her individual mini Christmas cakes and full-sized Christmas puddings this week. Send her a message if you’d like to place an order.

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 website. We can send your requirements to you anywhere in South Africa.

Our market activities  Come and visit us at the Old Biscuit Mill’s wonderfully exciting, atmospheric Neighbourgoods Market, as always, this Saturday and every Saturday between 09h00 and 14h00. Tip: Some visitors tell us how they struggle to find parking. It’s quite easy if you know how. Click here for a map which shows where we park.

Cape Point Vineyards Market in Noordhoek is where we'll be again next Thursday evening, December 27th. Come and buy some New Year treats, enjoy some of their stunning wines and have a picnic while you watch the sun go down.

Holidays     Well, most of you will have packed it in at work and are taking a holiday. Because of the way the dates fall, it is possible that you are taking a lovely long break for only a few days of leave. But some of us have to work and make money. We see super photos of where you are on Facebook, walking on beaches, in the mountains, braaiing and eating enormous crayfish, or dosas in India. We just work. We are envious. It is a rewarding time of year, being able to supply all our customers with the luxuries they need for Christmas and New Year and getting paid for doing so. But we SO need a break away from all this. Lynne is fantasizing about walking along an empty beach soon. Maybe March.

Our Internet shop is showing great results and we hope to add lots of new products to it in the New Year. Luckily the social work events calm down a lot in December so we do find ourselves with days off with little to do, except work from home. We hope you have been able to take time off to be with your family and loved ones; that you will have a great break and a Happy Christmas and New Year or whatever celebration is appropriate to you and makes you happy. We hope we see lots of you next year.ope we
Carolling in key, but in the dark     This week we managed to squeeze in a visit to Kirstenbosch for Carols by Candlelight, an annual event which we love and try not to miss. Sadly, it is now Carols by Glowstick, safer for the little ones we realise, but it has lost a great deal of its charm and atmosphere and the glow sticks do not give that much light, so we found it quite hard to read the hymn sheet without a torch. But we enjoyed a good bellow, a lovely picnic and lots of lovely carols. And the grass is always spotless when everyone leaves, which is impressive. Would that all who go to our coastline could leave it as clean… Click here for some photos

Feasting with Cees van Casteren MW at Waterkloof     On Monday night we were invited to a function at Waterkloof restaurant in Somerset West. Cees van Casteren has become the 301st Master of Wine and is only the second one from the Netherlands. His dissertation was on Chenin and many of the people in the South African wine industry were invited to answer a questionnaire he wrote as part of this; and we were two of them. He generously provided a superb dinner, told us about the Master of Wine examinations, which are extremely difficult and take several years to complete. He also provided some absolutely amazing wines from his own cellar and put on two quizzes during the meal. Click here to see the pictures and what we ate and drank.

We drank local Chenins and other wines with our dinner and we had one "stand up" quiz, where we all tasted the same wine blind and then Cees asked us various questions like: “Is the wine you are tasting local or foreign?” Then all those who thought local had to sit down. And so it went until there were only two people left standing: Tyrrel Myburgh and Rijk Melck. They both managed to identify the wine we were all tasting as a Bordeaux left bank St Julien and, finally, Rijk won by a nose. During the second quiz each table got a carafe of wine to identify amongst themselves, and each table had a different wine. Our table managed to come second. These are great fun quizzes to do with your wine club and we had wine left over to drink with the food.

This week’s Recipe     There is no recipe this week, as we are sure you all have had your Christmas meal planned for weeks. If you want to know what to do with the leftovers, watch the Food channels, they seem to have countless ideas this month.
And finally…

There won’t be an issue of MENU next week or in the first week of January; we will be taking a tiny rest, but we wish you all a very, very Happy Christmas and an even better 2013 to come. Drive safely, drink wisely and well. Above all, have a wonderful time.

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 help you choose an event to visit, click on 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. Click here to access the Calendar. You will need to be connected to the internet. We have a new calendar for 2013. Check it here.

Learn about wine and cooking We have had 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 here.

Chez Gourmet in Claremont has a programme of cooking classes. A calendar of their classes can be seen here. Pete Ayub, who makes our very popular Prego sauce, runs evening cooking classes at Sense of Taste, his catering company in Maitland. We can recommend them very highly, having enjoyed his seafood course. Check his programme here. Nadège Lepoittevin-Dasse has cooking classes in Fish Hoek and conducts cooking tours to Normandy. You can see more details here.

Sadly, refreshing our restaurant specials list takes more time than we have, especially at this time of the year, so we have set it aside for now. There are numerous special dinners listed in the above-mentioned events calendar.

13th December 2012 

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 product list 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 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 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.

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 and keep our mailing list strictly confidential. 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.

Carols at Kirstenbosch

The crowds gather early and find comfortable places on the sloping lawn

and are entertained by the bands while lights come on over the city

glow sticks are not as much fun as candles, but phones are also quite handy

with much enthusiastic waving of the sticks, safer but not anywhere close to being as much fun as real candles.

A look down at Llandudno in the light of the new moon on our way home

© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2012