Southern
double-collared sunbird hen enjoying an evening cocktail
In this
week’s MENU:
On
Line Shop
This
week’s Product menu
Our
market activities - Neighbourgoods, Long Beach
Stir
Crazy Cooking School
Muratie
Harvest Festival
Recipe:
Spanish bread salad
Wine
and Food Events
Wine
courses & cooking classes
Main Ingredient's On Line Shop is performing very well. Thank
you to all those who have purchased goods through it and thanks to the Post Offic
e, who have delive red everything safely. We are continuing to update the shop
with new products and with photographs of products. When you place an order, please do not pay
until we have confirmed availability and invoiced you. When you make
an eft payment, make sure that it says who you are. Use the form on the website
to email us your order and we will send you the final invoice once we’ve made
sure stock is available. Click here to see the shop.
This week’s Product menu Further down the page, we have written about sherry
vinegar. We also have Italian balsamic and red and white wine vinegars, French
Provence herb and shallot flavoured red wine vinegars and the wonderful 10 year
old Raspberry Balsamic from Protea Hill Farm. In addition, we have a wide range
of balsamic reductions, local and Italian.
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. On Friday, March 8th, we will be back at the market in
Long Beach Mall, Sun Valley, Fish Hoek.
Are you a Stir crazy candidate? This successful cookery school, owned and run by Chef
Brett Nussey, was located in Hout Bay and has now moved to Observatory to share
premises with Andy Foulkes DISH Food and Social catering company, on the corner
of Anzio and Main roads. We were invited to the launch last Thursday and had a
happy time talking to Brett and to other guests while we sampled some good
canapés coming out of the Stir Crazy kitchen. If you are interested in any of
these courses check
out their web site. Click here to see pictures of the launch.
Muratie’s Annual Harvest Festival This annual open day took place last Saturday and was
also part of their Summer series of music concerts. We managed to get there
after the Biscuit Mill by a quarter past three and, sadly, just missed their
special vertical tasting of Muratie wines. This annual open day at
Muratie, a celebratory family event, features good food, fine wine, great
company, live music and lots of fun stomping the newly harvested grapes.
Michelle Stewart and Dr Rijk Melck, the owner of Muratie,
welcomed us with a glass of crisp, lively and bready Lady Alice MCC, which is
their new release named after an owner of the farm at the turn of the last
century who loved to party. They settled us at a good table under the trees and
some of the wonderful wines that had been in the vertical tasting were produced
for us to try. Sitting, sipping great wines in a lovely atmosphere of fun, we
were very entertained by the very talented and amusing band The Rites who
played loads of rock and roll, folk, blues, punk and other 70’s hits, which had
the audience up on its feet dancing. We were allowed to choose from Muratie’s
delicious new summer menu and soon had enormous juicy beef Gourmet hamburgers
(R60) with lots of lovely tomato relish and chips. Click here to see the photos
We learned that the favourite wine of the tasting had
been the 2008 Chardonnay, which we found to be bready and elegant with wispy
wood notes, a full mouth and long, long layered flavours. We then tasted the
2009 which is full of vanillins, and soft wood with good fruit and an alcohol
kick at the end. Our favourite was the 2005 Chardonnay, supremely elegant and
still with good fruit and depth. Next came the George Paul Canitz Pinot Noir
2010, made in very expensive Burgundian oak; its nose is full of incense and a
salty tang. It has good red berry fruit, nice minerality and the incense and
salt also appear on the palate - definitely a wine to age well. Then, finally,
the Ansela van de Caab 2009 red blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and
Cabernet Franc. It is the savoury Cabernet Franc which shows on the nose with
expensive wood notes. You taste good dark red berries, soft chalky tannins and
it is something to add to your cellar as it needs time to come to its best in a
couple of years’ time.
Thank you Muratie for yet another special experience
on the farm; it is a great family day out. Everyone departed with a bottle of 3 year old
Muratie port as a gift and we were also given some of their really good honey
and nougat and a further two older wines to taste at our leisure.
Please
note: the last concert of the season will be on Sunday 10th March. The
band will be Matt Woosey & José Luis Pardo, highly-acclaimed international
blues artists. Time: 14h30 Tickets: R80 per person
Tickets include a glass of Muratie wine on
arrival. Children under 12 enter free. It is
preferable to make your booking in advance and pay via EFT to ensure a table,
but some tables will be kept aside for walk-ins on the day. Muratie can
accommodate up to 120 people, and in the event of rain, Muratie will try and
accommodate the people inside. Do not miss these shows. What a wonderful way to while away a lazy summer afternoon.
Dinner parties As the summer lazily moves on, we are managing to
entertain a little bit during the week. What has been irritating about this
year is that we have not been able to do this as much as we want to and there
have been so few evenings when we can eat out on our deck because of wind, rain
or damp chill. Last night, we entertained some old and new friends and we did
manage to sit out before and after dinner.
Lynne cooked a fairly simple supper of chicken pie and
we started with Salmorejo – a fresh tomato soup made with raw tomatoes, garlic,
bread, sherry vinegar and olive oil. The ingredients are all blitzed together
and served cold with chopped egg to sprinkle on top. The secret of this dish is
to hide four or five pieces of peeled naartjie (Satsuma/tangerine) in the
bottom of the soup. We have to use tinned at this time of the year, as it is a
winter fruit, but this works equally well. Another cold Spanish soup we love is
Ajo Blanco – ground almonds, garlic, sherry vinegar and oil and, of course, Gazpacho
also needs sherry vinegar.
Lots of dishes do need the addition of some acidity
and we find that Spanish sherry vinegar is a wonderful solution, as it adds
flavour and a slight kick to any dish that needs pulling together. We sell 3
year old and 8 year old Solera vinegars and a less pedigreed, more inexpensive
one. Click here to see them in our on line shop.
It makes an excellent salad dressing, can be used to
marinate fish before grilling, and today’s recipe might just save your bacon
when you come home and find you don’t have much in the house for supper. It is
the ideal way to yesterday’s crusty bread that is becoming too hard. If you
don’t have large tomatoes, use baby ones. We keep chorizo in the freezer; it
doesn’t take long to defrost it or other frozen sausages. You can throw in
olives, capers, boiled eggs, even anchovies should you have them in the fridge.
Spanish Bread
Salad
Thick
slices of yesterday’s crusty bread – 2 garlic cloves – 1 red pepper, chopped
into chunks - 3 large ripe tomatoes, cut into chunks – tin of chick peas,
drained – 2 T Spanish sherry vinegar – 80 ml good extra virgin olive oil – 1 t
smoked Spanish paprika - salt and pepper – a handful of roughly chopped parsley- 1 chorizo
or garlic sausage
Grill the bread on both sides then wipe a cut end of
garlic over each slice. Cut up the bread into bite sized pieces and put into a
bowl with the red pepper, tomatoes, chick peas and parsley. Make a dressing
with the vinegar and oil and smoked paprika, seasoning to taste and pour over
the salad. Cut the sausage into slices, fry till crisp and add to the dish and
serve.
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.
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.
26th February 2013
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 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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