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The freedom of
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In
this week’s MENU:
Birthday at Societi
Bistro Photography – a
Rant A Wellington
Weekend Food and wine (and
a few other) events for you to enjoy Learn about wine
and cooking
To get the whole of our story, please
click on “READ ON.....” at the end of each paragraph, which will
lead you to the related 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.
This week’s Product menu – Like many of you, we are
enjoying Rick Stein’s series about Indian food. Naturally, spices are essential
ingredients of Indian cooking. Not all the spices you will need are easily
available in supermarkets, but we can give you access to them and to other essential ingredients like rose water. See them all here
Birthday at
Societi Bistro Where to celebrate Lynne’s
Birthday? We knew, after our busy week, that we were going to be extra busy on
Thursday - writing and editing MENU and processing photographs. So we couldn’t
go out of town. We attended a function at Societi recently and were extremely
impressed with the food. It had been rather a long time since we last ate
there. They had a table and off we went. It was buzzing and is obviously one of
Cape Town’s most popular restaurants. They run monthly specials featuring
French regional food and you can mix these in with courses off the blackboard
menu. It turned out to be a very funny and enjoyable evening, with a surprise
ending. READ ON....
Photography – a
Rant John is a professional photographer, he
has been all his working life. He has had his own studio, specialising in car
photography as well as cosmetics and a variety of other consumer products. He
spent four years in London and Norway studying photography at one of the best
photographic schools in the world, the Polytechnic in London, now the
University of Westminster. He does it professionally and he does it for
pleasure and many of you comment on how much you like his photographs. We take
photographs for MENU
at restaurants, functions and wine farms. Sometimes we are asked if the people
involved can use them.
There is a school of people
who think (erroneously) that it is the camera that takes the photograph. It
does not. It is the photographer and a good photographer can take a prize
winning photograph using a pin hole camera, a box brownie or a very expensive
Hasselblad that most people would struggle to use. It is an art getting people
and places into the right light and composition and making it all look
effortless. And after you have taken the photograph, there is a great deal of
work to be done in balancing light, tone, shade, cropping the picture and many
other technical things you may possibly never have heard nor thought about.
So why am I fuming? Because we
have attended several functions lately where the organisers have asked for some
of the photographs, because they didn’t employ a “professional”. Photos which
we took to use in MENU, this e-publication, which goes to thousands of readers
every week. In each case, John sent the photos and a bill. A very small one,
given the amount of work involved. We received replies which thanked him but
expressed surprise at being asked for money.
And these were from
‘professional’ PR and commercial people. Our time and talents don’t come
without a price, we all have to earn a living. From Lynne, whose grandfather
was a pioneering professional Fleet Street photographer.
A Wellington
Weekend You may recall that we were invited to
Dunstone House in April to stay and we wrote about it in MENU. We like it very much and
when we heard about their winter special, which runs from April to end of
August each year, we thought we would take members of our wine club to stay for
a Saturday and that would give us all an opportunity to explore Wellington
wines. We had a group of keen travelling companions and were surprised that
several of them had never been to Wellington before. It is only one hour from
Cape Town and is a very beautiful and hospitable valley.
We started the weekend by
meeting at Klein
Optenhorst to see the Ferreiras’ magnificent garden and taste some
of their newly released Pinot Noir MCC, grown on the farm but vinified by Peter
Ferreira, who is not related to Naas Ferreira but to Jenny, his wife, the
gardener.
Nabygelegen Then it was on to see James McKenzie at Nabygelegen,
just down the road. James and his partner Adele gave us a superb tasting of his
wines and they laid on a very good cheese and meat platter for lunch which cost
R80 pp.
Dunstone We were not moving far on our first day in the valley as Dunstone is
also just the other side of the Bovlei Road from Nabygelegen. We arrived a
little weary to be welcomed by tea and cake and then everyone went off to their
rooms for a rest, a sunbath, a walk or a read. We all met later for supper at
their Restaurant, The Stone Kitchen.
Roger Jørgensen was next on Sunday morning. While our group knows
quite a lot about wine and winemaking, most of us are not very au fait with the
making of spirits and it was a treat to have Roger take us through the
processes he uses and then a trip into his garden and workroom to smell all the
aromatics, botanicals and other ingredients that he uses in the making of his brandy, gin,
akvavit, and other interesting alcohols.
Because we had spent so much
time at Jørgensen’s, we were woefully late for the appointment John had made at
Bosman
Family Vineyards but Bea, who runs their tasting room, was very good
about it and gave us a good tasting of their ranges of wines in the old cellar.
Sincere apologies from us all.
Then it was off to Diemersfontein
for a tasting and lunch. As the day was so balmy we were able to sit out on the
terrace and do our tasting at the same table we later had lunch at. David Sonnenberg
came to welcome the group and answer any questions we had. He kindly invited us
all to come and see the manor house and gardens after lunch, but sadly that
took rather a long time to arrive so we didn’t manage to get there. Perhaps
next visit. Photos of the weekend can be seen here
ENTER AND WIN Excelsior wine estate is
celebrating 100 years of hospitality at Excelsior Manor Guesthouse - on a
working wine farm in Robertson – this month and they are giving away 100 cases
of Excelsior wine in celebration! Enter here to stand the chance of
winning 1 of 3 cases of wine daily! Until 31st August. So do it now! All entries stand a chance to win the Grand Prize of an
all-inclusive 2-night stay at 4 Star Excelsior Manor for you and a friend. The
competition is open to South African residents only.
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 type of
event 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 list of wine and food
pairing dinners, list
of Special events with wine and/or food connections,
list of Wine Shows and Tastings and list of special dinner events.
All the events are listed in date order and we 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
The Hurst Campus, an accredited school for people who want to become
professional chefs, will soon start a new series of short courses in baking.
Check the ad in our blog page or 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
four module course for keen home cooks at his Maitland complex. Details
here
Nadège Lepoittevin-Dasse has French cooking classes in Noordhoek
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
21st August 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! ®
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