© John Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2013
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
16th January 2013 Main Ingredient's MENU - Pringle Bay, Cuvée at Simonsig, Choices, Dinner for Five, Orange panna cotta recipe
MENU
Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet
Foods & Ingredients
Eat
In Guide’s Outstanding Outlet Award Winner from 2006 to 2010
+27
21 439 3169 / +27 83 229 1172
The view across Pringle Bay towards Gordon’s
Bay
In this week’s MENU:
On
Line Shop
This
week’s Product menu
Our
market activities
Pringle
Bay
Restaurant
review: Cuvée at Simonsig
Choices
Dinner
for Five
Recipe:
Orange panna cotta
Wine
and Food Events
Wine
courses & cooking classes
To tell our whole story here would take too much
space, so take a look at our Main Ingredient
blogs. Follow this link: http://adamastorbacchus.blogspot.com/
to where you can read current and
earlier blogs. 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
This week’s Product menu Sumac is in steady demand and we will have more today.
Middle Eastern foods are always popular in our climate and the za’atar spice
mix and the Moroccan ras el hanout are steady favourites as are orange blossom
water and rose water, which are so essential for Eastern Mediterranean recipes.
You can find them in our online shop, which is performing very well. We are
continuing to update it with new products and with photographs of products. Click
here to see the shop. When you place an order, please 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.
We will have more Prego sauce on Friday afternoon.
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 tomorrow evening, January 17th. Come and buy some treats,
enjoy some of their stunning wines and have a picnic while you watch the sun go
down. On
Friday 25th, you will find us at Long Beach Mall once again.
We
have had a marvellously busy week, doing family and friend things, not the sort
of things we ever go into detail about in MENU.
We spent two days in Pringle Bay, staying with friends from Johannesburg and
just catching up and enjoying a long walk on the beach in quite breezy and wet
weather. We attended a lovely family wedding in Franschhoek when Lynne’s niece
got married and we have had overseas and local friends to dinner.
While
in Pringle Bay, we did happen to visit Lemon and Lime, a really well presented
and stocked deli which impressed us so much that we have we have sent Abigail
Donnelly, the editor of Eat In magazine, our nomination for the next edition of
the magazine. If you are in or passing through the area, do call in and see
what they are about. Very like our old concept in Sea Point with lots and lots
of excellent local produce; they also have a very good wine selection.
Cuvée On Sunday we were taken by a generous friend to Cuvée
restaurant on Simonsig farm. It turned out to be another
perfect day in the Cape and we had a table under the trees and an umbrella on
the terrace, with another fantastic view of the mountains and vineyards. A very
jovial and fun lunch ensued and we really loved what we ate and drank and the
company. Simonsig has a comprehensive wine list and is, perhaps, best known as
the originators of Cap Classique sparkling wine with their excellent Kaapse
Vonkel. We opted for their very good, fresh sauvignon blanc, which is made from
80% Simonsig grapes and 20% from Darling. Three of us had the venison main
course and we chose the Simonsig SMV (Shiraz & mourvedre with a dash of
viognier). It is light enough to serve lightly chilled with a summer lunch and
is also quite light on the pocket. We enjoyed it. Ripe fruit flavour with a
touch of coffee matched the dish very well. Click here to see more, the menu and the pictures of the
food and the view.
Give us more - choice? One of the dishes Lynne ordered was Springbok loin
with tongue. She has come up with a slightly new concept for those chefs out
there. She loves tongue a little more than she loves Springbok. When offering
these combination dishes, how about offering the choice of being able to choose
more of one component as your main ingredient. In other words, lots of tongue
with a little springbok loin or the other way around. Would this work
practically in a commercial kitchen?
We do
not approve, at all, of people trying to tinker with a conceived menu which has
taken the chef a lot of time and trouble to come up with, source the
ingredients and prepare but if you have cooked both, could one not choose more
of the ingredient one likes the most?
Dinner for five Our dinner party on Monday night was for our
Johannesburg friends and a friend who has just arrived from London for three
months. As the day was hot, Lynne made three dips: a real guacamole, humus and
an aioli and served lots of crudités and nachos to accompany. We had Graham
Beck Brut Rosé as a sundowner and followed this with a bottle of Thelema
Sutherland chardonnay 2008. At this point the sea breezes started to blow
strongly and we had to retreat inside to our quite warm dining room.
Our
main course was 'Pollo
Orvietana' - Chicken with Kalamata olives, herbs, potatoes and Balsamic vinegar, the perfect one dish meal for a warm evening,
served with a green bean and mixed leaf salad with croutons, pecan nuts and a
pomegranate dressing. We had a lovely bottle of Cathy Marshall’s 2004 Syrah which
went perfectly with this quite tangy dish and was smooth and supple and fruity.
Dessert was an Orange panacotta served with granadilla puree, cherries and
strawberries and this went with a bottle of Nuy 2005 White Muscadel (not the
whole bottle!)
This
was quite a simple meal to prepare as no-one wants to spend much time in the
kitchen at the moment. The only difficulty was the aioli which split twice
because of the heat and the recipe Lynne followed made it much too salty and so
having to start again was a blessing in disguise. Someone should really send
the Salt Police out to check recipes sometimes. One egg and a teaspoon of salt?
No way, unless you want to be up all night drinking water.
Panna
cotta (cooked cream) takes minutes to prepare. You can alter your flavours
according to your whim; just keep the liquid quantities the same. If you want
to make a chocolate panna cotta, you will need to use the Nielsen Massey
Chocolate extract rather than melted chocolate, which would turn it into a
heavier chocolate blancmange but you can serve with chocolate curls or shavings
or a chocolate sauce.
You
need to make these the day before or in the morning, as they do need time to
set. This recipe makes 6 individual servings.
Orange Panna Cotta
3 leaves of
gelatine (7.5 g) – 500 ml cream – 25g sugar – 50 ml Curacao orange liqueur – 1
t orange extract – 1 granadilla – 12 cherries – 12 strawberries
Soften the
gelatine in cold water for a few minutes only. Heat the rest of the ingredients
in a heavy bottomed pan; do not bring
to the boil. The longer you cook this, the less alcohol will remain in the mix.
Remove the gelatine from the water, shake off any extra moisture and add it to
the cream and stir till dissolved. Cool slightly then pour into individual
ramekins or cups. Put them into the fridge for at least 6 hours to set.
To serve, turn
them out carefully onto each dessert plate and decorate with a spoonful each of
granadilla pulp, 2 cherries and 2 strawberries
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. 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.
16th January 2013
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.
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Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Sunday al fresco lunch at Cuvée, Simonsig
The simple but complete
menu with lots of great choices:
The Beef Caesar salad –
chalmar beef tartare, pancetta, white anchovy, cos lettuce and lightly boiled
egg.
Fresh and simple, the
asparagus starter topped with tender chicken, and a truffled vinaigrette foam
Lynne’s starter of sashimi
of game fish – it was yellowtail, tuna and salmon. With nashi pieces (its a
Japanese pear), a spicy cucumber and seaweed salad, yuzu mayonnaise and a soy
dressing. No, she didn't eat the cucumber
but it was a fantastic dish
John started with the
smoked duck breast and confit duck leg set in a terrine with blueberries and
grilled sourdough bread. The smoked duck
breast was rather like bacon and the blueberries were the perfect accompaniment
to this rich paté
Slightly disconcerting
presentation of a great dish: Richard, our host, had the tender Mushroom stuffed
quail with pancetta, pearl onions, on crushed potatoes and a grape and
Chardonnay sauce.
Another guest had the
crispy pork belly with spicy Asian greens, mirin poached nashi (pears) and
crispy rice balls.
Three of us could not
resist the Venison loin with ox tongue, cauliflower puree, red onion and a
Marsala jus. Lynne would have liked Ox Tongue with a topping of venison loin!
A toast to life with their
extremely good Sauvignon blanc - one guest called it "sunshine in a glass". Light and refreshing, it was the best choice of
the day for those drinking white wine.
Our red wine choice was Simonsig SMV (Shiraz, Mourvedre, Viognier) 2010, which had delicious fruit and was light enough to go with lunch on a hot day. It was slightly chilled.
Only John could manage a
dessert and it was his normal passion for Chocolate that made him succumb to
the Valrhona chocolate terrine with cherries and a raspberry sherbet.
Two chose the cheese plate
with fresh figs and local preserves. The rest of us settled for coffee.
The view from the terrace
© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2013
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