Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Natural beauty and wine farms, Franschhoek

After Bastille, we took some time to relax in comfort at Basse Provence and enjoy the scenery








and visit a few wine producers, starting with Boekenhoutskloof


where Innocent Mpahleni looked after us


and we had a chat with Marc Kent


Then a visit to Holden Manz (formerly Klein Genot)


where Hanri Marais and her colleague, "the back room girls"


and Guy Kidian 


looked after us and introduced us to Gerard ("Big G") and Migo, the owners


Then a spot of lunch at the Salmon Bar

































after which we visited Jean-Philippe Colmant at MCC producer, Colmant, who gave us a very generous amount of his time and delicious tastes of his wine





Franschhoek Bastille celebration

We went on Sunday, which was very civilised, although the music was a bit loud. 
We were told that Saturday was a maelstrom of enthusiastic consumption
We started with tastes of bubbly from Boschendal, Topiary and Graham Beck


Oysters from Wild peacock, pancakes from the Hospice and venison Bitterballen from Le Quartier Francaise


The best value lunch came from Mont Rochelle


There was amusement for all ages


The barrel rolling race was a popular diversion

and there were plenty of other things to enjoy



Neil Jewell showed his delicious cured meats
Nicole from Glenwood with their delicious chardonnay


































Solms Delta attracted a crowd of enthusiasts
after a most enjoyable day.

Friday, July 15, 2011

Tasting Eikendal wines at Catharina's

Catharina's, on the right
Wines, ready for the tasting
Lynne, Christian Eedes, Nico Grobler and Kathy Raath (who distributes Eikendal wines)
Stuart Buchan (Eikendal GM) with Higgo Jacobs and Roland Peens
The Steenberg Manor House
Steenberg squirrels are also well fed!
Glasses as sculpture in the Steenberg tasting room

110708 Main Ingredient's MENU - Tastings at the Taj and Eagles' Nest, Liver paté, restaurant specials and events to enjoy


MENU
Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet Foods, Ingredients & Fine Wines
Eat In Guide’s Outstanding Outlet Award Winner from 2006 to 2010
 Gulls bathing in a pond in Green Point Park

GREAT FOOD AND WINE PAIRING TO EXPERIENCE     Last Friday, we were invited by the management of the Taj hotel to join them at a tasting and dinner at #3 in their regular Wine Tasting Series. For the princely sum of R310 you get to take part in a superb tasting of wines from a selection of vineyards and meet the winemakers. This is then followed by a four course dinner at Mint matched to some of the wines you have just tasted and the winemakers join you in the restaurant. We had a marvellous time tasting Bartinney, Kleine Zalze, Eagles’ Nest, Mischa and Groot Constantia wines. The menu included very good Norwegian salmon sashimi, a super light Japanese style mushroom soup flavoured with truffles and divine braised veal shanks. Because John is allergic to mushrooms, they were kind enough to serve him a superb Tom Yum soup. We finished with a plate of apple desserts.  The next dinner, Series #4, will take place on 28th July and will be with wines from Ken Forrester, Stonehill, Peter Falke, Noble Hill and Avondale.
The Eagle – Landed    Last night, our wine club’s monthly meeting was held at Eagles’ Nest winery in Constantia where Stuart Botha, the winemaker, took us through their wines.  We loved and bought some of their second label the Little Eagle Blend of Cab Franc, Merlot and will be back to buy some of their Viognier which is being bottled today and released immediately but, sadly, was not available last night. Little Eagle is made from the same grapes as the premium Verreaux red blend and the proceeds from the sale of the wine go to a fund for o conservation of the  Black (Verreaux's) eagle. There is one breeding pair on Table Mountain.  We are saving up for some of the other wines, especially their extremely good Merlot which has won lots of awards. All their wines are grown on the farm, except for the good crisp and fragrant Sauvignon Blanc which has grapes from Durbanville and Koekenaap.  We all finished the evening off with a dinner of pasta and pizza at Green’s and they catered very well for the large numbers. Not at all expensive, but we do wonder why Constantia has so few good affordable restaurants.  Or are we mistaken?  We hope you will tell us; we have to be there again next month, when we have an evening planned at High Constantia. And no, 24 people are not going to go to La Colombe!
SPICY AND HOT    We and several of our friends are great fans of Asian spicy foods.  We have a branch of Simply Asia at the end of Sea Point but, as it is in a very draughty mall, you don’t go there to eat in winter. It’s cold enough waiting for a take away to be ready. Their food is superb value, authentic, prepared in front of you and you can have it at three levels of heat. Friends took us to the Park Street (just off Kloof Street in Town) branch the other evening and we enjoyed a really good meal: four starters – 2 Tom Yum soups, one Dim Sum basket and duck spring rolls; four dishes of different style noodles and corkage cost us just R430 including service. The chef on duty that night had rather a heavy hand on the chilli though and, after seeing our ‘chilli fan’ friends sweat through the extraordinarily hot soup, we all opted for mild on our main courses!  Lynne’s dish of Ho Fun broad noodles with a roasted chilli paste, prawns and calamari was one she had had before and the “medium” in Sea Point is just within her tolerance level – but she wouldn’t have survived the Park Street dish.
DINING IN    After quite a busy period ‘out’, we are finally starting to entertain again at home. Tonight we are having our neighbours over and Lynne is cooking Michael Oliver’s Waterblommetjie Bredie but has mixed lamb with springbok, which might well be the way things were done in the past.  She is making a chocolate tart lined with a layer of quince paste using Willie Harcourt Coose’s bitter Madagascan chocolate. Our starter is a stunning chicken liver and pistachio nut paté covered in Parma ham. Our hostess made it for a dinner we had at friends’ on Saturday and Lynne copied the recipe, which is this week’s recipe for you to try. It is really easy and quick and absolutely delicious. If you don’t want to use bacon or ham, you could use Bressaola to line the paté dish and, perhaps, use macon in the paté mix. 
PAMELA’S CHICKEN AND PISTACHIO PATÉ
8 thin slices of Parma or Prosciutto ham – 2 T butter – 2 T olive oil – 80g finely diced bacon – 1 onion, finely chopped  – 2 cloves of garlic, crushed – 500g chicken livers – 3 bay leaves – 80 ml brandy or sherry – 125 g butter, softened – 50 g pistachio nuts, toasted
You will need a loaf tin, which you line neatly with cling film or foil.  Then carefully line it with the slices of ham, so that it hangs over the sides, making sure each slice overlaps.  Heat the butter and oil together and fry the bacon, onion and garlic for 5 to 6 minutes, or until soft but not browned.
Trim the livers of any veins, fat or filaments.  Add them to the pan with the bay leaves and cook for 3 to 4 minutes until they are brown on the outside but still pink inside. Add the brandy or sherry and simmer stirring continuously for 3 minutes or until the liquid has almost disappeared.  Remove the bay leaf. Put the mixture into a food processor and blend to a very fine texture. Gradually add the rest of the butter and blend till smooth. Season then stir in the pistachios. Spoon the mixture into the tin and fold the ham over the top to enclose it. Refrigerate for at least 3 hours before serving. You can keep this in the fridge for a couple of days; the flavour will improve and it will be easier to slice. Cut into slices and serve with crisp French bread, toast points or melba toast.
PROBLEM SOLVING (*!!@3%*!$!*)     We thought you would be amused to hear that disasters in cooking happen to us not infrequently. This is how we attempted to solve today’s problem. As Lynne was taking the (chocolate tart) pastry base out of the oven, beautifully golden and crisp and buttery, the loose bottomed pie tin did a complete flip flop and the pie shell broke into several pieces on to the oven door. Lots of loud swearing and yelling ensued. Panic set in as time was too short to start making pastry from the start. About two thirds of the shell survived, so she reassembled it,  took the smaller broken pieces, crushed them, melted some butter and used it like cement to replace the holes in the base of the pastry. Set in the fridge while she melted the quince paste layer, this then was used to seal the pastry.  It will probably all break apart when serving, but at least she was able to bake the liquid ganache chocolate in the pie shell. Whew! Called learning on your feet.
Our market activities      This week, you will find us at The Place at Cavendish (Woolworths underground entrance to Cavendish Square) on Friday 8th July, from 10h00 to 17h00, where we will have our great selection of delicious treats and ingredients for you. We will be at the Old Biscuit Mill’s Neighbourgoods Market, as always, on Saturday between 9am and 2pm. Next Wednesday, we will be back at the Dean St Arcade in Newlands from 09h30 to 14h30.
Our product list has a wide variety of interesting delicacies and ingredients for you and we can send them to you, wherever you are in South Africa if you can’t visit us here in Arthur’s Road or at one of the above markets. Click here to access it and to order.
Good food and wine continues to grow as a focal point for many people in the Western Cape and, to an extent, in other parts of the country. As a result, our list of Interesting Food and Wine Events has grown so much that it was making MENU too long for some of our readers. So we’ve taken it online. Click here to access itYou will need to be connected to the internet.
Our  list of Winter restaurant special offers continues to grow. Click here to access it. These 2011 Winter Specials have been sent to us by the restaurants or their PR agencies. We have not personally tried all of them and their listing here should not always be taken as a recommendation from ourselves. When we have tried it, we’ve put in our observations. We have cut out the flowery adjectives etc. we’ve been sent, to give you the essentials. Click on the name to access the relevant website. All communication should be with the individual restaurants.






7th July 2011
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
New 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.
If you wish to be added to our mailing list, please send us a messageinserting"subscribe" in the subject line. If you wish to be removed from our mailing list, please send us a message, inserting "remove" in the subject line. 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 

Friday, July 08, 2011

110630 Main Ingredient's MENU - Moroccan Chicken Tagine, pirate party, new stock from France, restaurant specials and events to enjoy


MENU
Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet Foods, Ingredients & Fine Wines
Eat In Guide’s Outstanding Outlet Award Winner from 2006 to 2010
 Trees and Vineyards under a winter sky at Durbanville Hills
Noses to the grindstone     Like most of you, we are working very hard at the moment and have not had much time for ‘pleasure’ or even much time to spend with our mates. The wintry weather does nothing to encourage one to go out to eat and this is so damaging to the hospitality industry. We do try to go and sample some of the current winter specials and soon we will be spending some time in Franschhoek to try and cover some of the restaurants and wine farms there. We will be going there to celebrate Bastille weekend on Sunday the 17th of July (it starts on Saturday 16th) and the are staying over on Sunday and Monday nights which will give us two full days to ‘do’  Franschhoek – you will read about our experiences the following week.
LONG BEACH MALL MARKET     This popular market Is coming back and we plan to be there with our full range of products. The market is due to start tomorrow 1st of July and we hope to be there from Friday the 15th of July.
LOTS AND LOTS OF NEW AND EXCITING STOCK IN, mostly from France. We have jars of Cassoulet, Garbure, Cabbage stuffed with Duck Confit, Duck Basquaise, Beans cooked in Duck Fat, and tins of Madeira sauce, Cepe Sauce, Green Pepper Sauce plus more Duck Rillette, Duck Mousse with Foie, and lots and lots of jars of pates, some now in smaller sizes so you can sample them before buying the larger versions, or buy a selection. We also have the normal Duck and Goose Fat and tins of Duck Confit. AND we finally have tins of whole chestnuts, large jars of the Sweet Vanilla Chestnut puree and more of the superb 70% dark Belgian Chocolate callets from Callebaut. Check our updated product list HERE. You will, of course, need to be online, but the stock only arrived this afternoon, so please give us a few hours to update our list.
Saving time and effort and money     On Sunday this week, Lynne made a very straightforward roast chicken, cooked in a bag with lots of herbs and garlic, and served it with boiled new potatoes, lots of good white wine and chicken stock gravy and lots and lots of vegetables. Putting this together takes a very little time and produces a lovely Sunday dinner. But we only ate half the chicken. On Monday she took out a roll of flaky pastry from the freezer – we always keep some’ in case’ and fried up some onion, celery and garlic, added frozen peas, the remains of the chicken, potatoes and the vegetables cut into bite sized pieces, moistened the mixture with the rest of the gravy and made a chicken pie which has fed us for one meal with another two meal portions waiting in the freezer for another time. That means one chicken went into four meals and, if she had had the time, she could have made some chicken soup with the carcass. 
Our recipe this week is one more way to use left-over cooked chicken, chic enough to serve to your friends. Serves four. Use a standard cup measure. We sell a very good Ras al Hanout spice mixture for R15.
Moroccan Chicken Tagine
2 T olive oil - 1 onion, chopped – 2 cloves garlic, crushed –   2 t Ras el Hanout spice mix - 1 tin chickpeas – 2 cups of diced butternut – 2 cups of diced courgettes  - 2 parsnips, sliced – 8 to 10 baby potatoes – a can of chopped tomatoes– 1 cup chicken stock – ¼  cup of dried apricots – ¼  cup of green, pipped or stuffed olives – 2 or 3 cups of skinless cooked chicken, cut into bite sized pieces – ¼ cup of almonds – one preserved lemon cut into small slices
Fry the onion in the oil till soft and taking on colour, add the garlic and the Ras el Hanout and fry for a further 2 to 3 minutes.  Add the chickpeas, butternut, courgettes, parsnips, potatoes, tomatoes and stock and cook for 20 minutes or until the potatoes are soft.  Add the rest of the ingredients and warm through well.  Serve with cous cous or rice.
Cathy’s Wine Course Comes to the Winelands!!    For the last eight years, Cathy Marston has been running her hugely popular Wine Courses, turning wine novices into wine lovers and setting them on the path to enjoyable, informed drinking. Starting at The Nose Restaurant & Wine Bar, these courses have introduced more than 1,000 people to new wines, new winemakers, different wine experiences and – above all – given them confidence in their own tasting abilities and with the wine industry as a whole. Cathy studied for her Diploma at the Wine & Spirit Education Trust in London and is a passionate believer in making wine accessible, understandable and fun. Her courses cater for absolute beginners and seasoned wine-lovers alike, offering everyone the chance to try something new, ask questions and simply enjoy wine. If you’d like to learn more details about the hugely enjoyable courses run by this lovely lady, they are available in our Events pages.
Dombeya tasting and dinner at the The Square. Monday afternoon found us at The Square restaurant at the Vineyard Hotel in Newlands, where we joined the Executive Chef JB Louw, restaurant manager David Wibberley, Dombeya and Haskell winemaker Rianie Strydom and a few others to discuss the food which will be served at the Dombeya dinner on 5th August and the wines which will match the dishes. We won’t say more about it here, because we don’t want to pre-empt the event, but the ideas discussed were exciting. Rianie had just returned from her visit to Vinexpo in Bordeaux and we were very interested to hear her impressions of this vast exposition and her visit to Ch. Cheval Blanc and other wine estates in Bordeaux. Her wines will be served at the royal wedding in Monaco and she will be a guest at the wedding. We are looking forward to the dinner and hope to see some of you there.
Last Friday evening, we were guests at Mark Bilton’s pirate party at Bilton Estate in Stellenbosch. Mark Bilton was celebrating his birthday and the launch of the new release of his entry level Matt Black red and white wines. Everyone there had made a real effort with their costumes and there was a large and happy band of buccaneers in the cellar which had been decorated with skeletons, skulls, treasure chests and other appropriate paraphernalia. We took some pictures.
Our market activities      This week, you will find us at The Place at Cavendish (Woolworths underground entrance to Cavendish Square) on Friday 1st July, from 10h00 to 17h00, where we will have our great selection of delicious treats and ingredients for you. We will be at the Old Biscuit Mill’s Neighbourgoods Market, as always, on Saturday between 9am and 2pm. Next Wednesday, we will be back at the Dean St Arcade in Newlands from 09h30 to 14h30.
Good food and wine continues to grow as a focal point for many people in the Western Cape and, to an extent, in other parts of the country. As a result, our list of Interesting Food and Wine Events has grown so much that it was making MENU too long for some of our readers. So we’ve taken it online. Click here to access it. You will need to be connected to the internet.
Our  list of Winter restaurant special offers continues to grow. Click here to access it. These 2011 Winter Specials have been sent to us by the restaurants or their PR agencies. We have not personally tried all of them and their listing here should not always be taken as a recommendation from ourselves. When we have tried it, we’ve put in our observations. We have cut out the flowery adjectives etc. we’ve been sent, to give you the essentials. Click on the name to access the relevant website. All communication should be with the individual restaurants.

30th June 2011
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
New 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 Computer Associates® and 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 send us a message, inserting "subscribe" in the subject line. If you wish to be removed from our mailing list, please send us a message, inserting "remove" in the subject line