Saturday 11 September, 2010

On Saturday 11th September our sister convivium, Slow Food Cape Town, will be visiting Solms Delta wine estate outside Franschhoek to tour their culinary veldkos (indigenous food) garden project. They have kindly invited us to come along. You can view their invitation here.

Now, here’s the complicated part.

They have also arranged a delicious two-course lunch at Fyndraai, the Solms Delta restaurant, as part of the outing. However, as we try to offer affordable events, we have arranged with them so that members can choose to either attend both the veldkos garden tour and the restaurant meal for R230 for members and R250 for guests, OR they can attend only the vegetable garden tour for R40.

If you wish to attend both the vegetable garden tour AND the restaurant meal, please book through Slow Food Cape Town, by emailing Adrian at: adrad@mweb.co.za. Please note booking closes on Monday 6 September.

If you wish only to attend the vegetable garden tour and then make your own plans for lunch, please book through Slow Food Mother City, by filling in our online booking form.

Members who choose not to attend the lunch at Fyndraai restaurant are welcome to make their own plans for lunch in the area. The Slow Food Mother City committee will be picnicking and viewing the plum blossoms at a neighbouring private farm, and you are also welcome to join us on our picnic for no extra cost (aside from your own food and drink!).

If you are confused or just wish to ask a question, please contact Kate at kate@slowfoodmothercity.co.za.

View the full gallery.

This year is no different and there are some which tie in very well with Slow Food principles. Below is a teaser for three documentaries which we feel would be particularly relevant, but there are many more excellent documentaries on the schedule so feel free to go and read through it on their website.

www.encounters.co.za

The festival runs from the 12th to the 29th of August 2010. Some of the screenings are at the Nu Metro at the V&A Waterfront and others are at the Labia on Orange Street.

Dirt! The Movie

DIRS: Bill Benenson, Gene Rosow / USA
2009 / 85min / Narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis

Don’t be confused. English English also has a word for the “living, breathing skin”, unique to this planet, that has a negative connotation. Soil. But this is a positive film that traces the formation of ‘dirt’ over the millennia, how it has shaped us (at every burial we are reminded that we are dust) and how it features in many cultures’ folktales. Of course it is the very substance that sustains us – providing food, shelter, implements, warmth, even giving our wines their distinctive tastes if experts are to be believed. It’s humorous and engaging tone makes more palatable the caveat that, even in our deceptively environmentally-conscious world, this common or garden stuff matters as much as the air that we breathe, and gives examples of diverse, exciting and innovative projects where people are getting their hands dirty… and enjoying it. Courtesy of Woolworths

For the Best AND FOR the Onion!

DIR: Sani Elhadj Magori / Niger / France/ 2008 / 52min

Filmed in Galmi, Niger, this lingering and thoughtful film trims one of the most universally significant, and often most financially excessive, rites of passage to a bittersweet elemental level. For the Best and For the Onion charts the travails of Yaro, a hard man and an onion farmer, as he fights the elements, decreasing onion prices and competing farmers to finally provide his daughter Salamatou with nuptials that she and tradition deserve. Salamatou’s wedding teeters over the success of Yaro’s famous Galmi purple onion crop. Revelatory, succinct and simply told, the documentary follows Yaro and his labourers as they prepare the fields, transplant the seedlings, negotiate with the in-laws-to-be, sing the water in, seek advice, haggle over prices and bring in the harvest to ensure that his betrothed daughter doesn’t spend one more year as an embarrassed spinster.

Tapped

DIR: Stephanie Soechtig / USA / 2009 / 75min

Water, water everywhere, but at what a price to drink! This instantly gripping, well-researched documentary investigates the many negative health and environmental issues that surround the commercialisation of H2O. The director looks at diverse and troubling elements of the industry, charting the water’s course from its source, where the systematic plunder of free water for vast profit for international companies is at the ongoing detriment of entire communities, to the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and the terrifying reality of vast plastic bottle continents. In between are many worrying factors, environmental damage, unfettered and unregulated profits, contaminated so-called ‘pure’ water, and the human and planetary suffering that comes with the manufacture of easy-to-toss plastic bottles. Plunging into the well of deceit and misinformation about water, the film is sobering and thought provoking.

Slow Food Mother City is celebrating the last cozy days of winter with a visit to Lelieblom Farm just outside the West Coast town of Darling to sample waterblommetjies, an indigenous winter delicacy.

Waterblommetjies are the flowers of the Cape Hawthorn (Aponogeton distachyos), which grows wild in vleis and on riverbanks in the Cape.

They are historically linked to Afrikaans cuisine, but were probably first consumed by local hunter-gatherers. The buds are used in bredies (stews), soups and curries, and taste a little like green beans. The flowers can be added to salads. This is a true heritage food, and we are thrilled to be eating and learning more about them before their winter season ends.

Lelieblom is a working family farm, owned by Karen and Michael Basson, and shared with sheep, horses and other animals. They welcome visitors for a traditional farm feast in their farmhouse. Karen describes it best in her own words:

“YES!!!!! The waterblommetjies are still growing in August and we do sell.

The waterblommetjies grow in our dams on the farm and they come up every winter and sleep the whole summer and when the rains come again they wake up and fill the dams all by themselves, we don’t do anything to them, they look after themselves! We will gladly take you to tour the dams on the farm, the dams also only have water in winter, and it is great fun wading into the freezing cold water to pick the flowers. My husband is the brave one!

Lelieblom is really a true farm, we have no window dressing here for tourists or visitors, Children are welcome and we have lots of lovely tame hand reared farm animals! They are always a treat for the children.

Lelieblom is what you see is what you get and cooking is home cooking! We do things naturally and somewhat old fashioned. I am a home cook, nothing fancy, as far as possible I cook in the old ways. Waterblommetjies to me calls for a bredie, and I hope that is fine with you!

A menu for you could include the waterblommetjies obviously, curried tripe (delicious!!!!) which I would recommend as it is very traditional round here, served with soetpatat always!, rice, vegetables and dessert. I would really like to do tripe for you…dis lekker! Malva pudding with hot custard is my favourite dessert. We bake our own bread, served from the farm kitchen.

We use our home for functions so the experience is coming to a farm home and sharing the day with a farm family, that is the Lelieblom ethos.”

So join us and the Lelieblom family on Saturday, 21 August. We will walk around the farm for an hour and then sit down to a traditional home-cooked farm meal.

If waterblommetjies are still available, you are welcome to wade in the dam and pick your own, for which Lelieblom will charge you per bag picked. To learn more about Lelieblom, visit www.lelieblom.blogspot.com.

MENU
Waterblommetjie Bredie
Curried Tripe
Sweet Potatoes, Rice & Vegetables
Bread from the Farm Kitchen
Malva Pudding with Hot Custard
Tea and Coffee

Space is limited, so to reserve your place, please fill in our online booking form or email kate@slowfoodmothercity.co.za

EVENT DETAILS

Date, time and venue:

Saturday 21 August
Lelieblom Farm, Darling
11.00am (lunch will be served at 1pm)

Cost:
R135.00 for Members, R155.00 for Guests. Children 4-12 yrs R65.00 (parents are wholly responsible for their children during the outing).
Please bring your own wine and nonalcoholic beverages; only water and tea and coffee will be supplied by Lelieblom.

Bookings:
Given the popularity of this outing, we suggest you book and pay quickly. We have limited space! If you would like to come, please fill in our online booking form or email kate@slowfoodmothercity.co.za

First come, first served (members do get advance warning). If you have not made the deposit within 4 days of booking, and there are others waiting, we will make your space/s available to the next person in line. Please book before the 6th of August 2010.

REMEMBER TO BRING
For the farm tour: appropriate shoes and rain protection (Wellies if you plan to do some wading!)
For your meal: your own wine and nonalcoholic beverages.

Event feedback

We’d love your feedback on our events! If you’ve attended a Slow Food Mother City event, please let us know what you thought by emailing events@slowfoodmothercity.co.za. All comments and suggestions are welcomed.

Upcoming events:

If you can’t make it, but are keen for future outings, here’s a taster of the events and projects we’re organising for the months to come.

• Port & Chocolate truffle tasting (September, date TBC)
• Slow Food Film Evening (September/October, date TBC)
• Organic plum picking (November, date TBC)

If you would like to become a member of Slow Food Mother City (only R70 per annum), sign up here.

Photo credits: Chapman’s Photo Odyssey/Flickr and BigBlackBox/Flickr.

I always imagined mead as a rough kind of beer, something dark, brewed from hay and potatoes, that would go well with a haunch of wild boar. So the mead tasting at Touch of Madness on Friday 23 April was a revelation.

Mead is the most ancient alcoholic drink, easy for our ancestors to discover as made simply from honey, water and yeast. Types of mead can be found in pretty much every culture that’s in contact with bees. So in Ethiopia it’s tej, while in the Eastern Cape, the Xhosa call it iQhilika. Most of the meads we tasted were from a small brewery in Grahamstown called Makana Meadery, which is inspired by the local methods of mead-making (the yeast, for example, is indigenous, harvested from the roots of a drought resistant plant). The Makana bottles are sealed with a wax capsule, a nod to the bees.

Fig-infused mead, glowing golden in the sun.

Cape Winemaster Hanneke van de Linde led the tasting of five Makana meads, under the brand name Honey Sun, and a homebrew. It’s quite common for the brew to be infused with herbs or spices – this style is called metheglin. Makana also infuses its meads – the first flight was fig (infused with the fruit and leaves of the Cape Fig), coffee (scented with wild beans from the Koffie Bay area) and chili. The first thing that surprised me was how light and golden the drink was. Served chilled, or it becomes viscous, it has a strong floral, slightly vegetative nose and complex, not overly sweet, flavour. The fig flavour had natural affinity, with slight cinnamon overtones, the coffee was more minerally and the chili offered a wooded nose with a satisfying kick at the end of the palate.

Mead tasting notes and glasses at the ready...

Then we tasted the Honey Sun dry, a subtle mead of pure honey, and Makana’s award-winning herbal mead, infused with rooibos, honeybush tea, cinnamon and apple. This was the most complex and sophisticated of the meads – definitely one to add to the cellar. Finally, we tried ‘Trevor’s Home Brew’, and this was the cloudy, dark, nutty mead we had imagined – Christmas cake on the nose and a creamy mouthfeel. Made in a bucket in the cupboard and unfiltered, this was rough and ready, and pretty delicious, stuff!

Touch of Madness put on a mead-friendly meal, with a sweet and spicy chicken stir-fry followed by rooibos -infused crème brulee. Although it’s best served as a welcome drink on ice, or with biscuits after a meal, Makana’s light golden mead would also pair well with Morrocan food or a Cape-style fruity curry. It’s a beautiful drink with a fascinating history that’s sure to spark conversation around the dinner table.

Did you know?

In Europe, it was traditional to give newlyweds enough mead to last them a month, hence the term honeymoon. The idea was that the mead would inspire cheerfulness and abandon, and at the end of the moon-cycle the couple would have proved their fertility with a pregnancy. Having indulged, I can see how that might work, actually…

Yes, mead has been fused with more interesting herbs in the past...

Oded Schwartz and a selection of his preserves

Oded is an expert in just about every preserve you can think of, whipping up huge batches of everything from old-fashioned sweet-and-sour gherkins to strawberry and vodka jam. He’s always experimenting with new techniques and ingredients, as evidenced by his onion konfyt (prepared like South African figs traditionally are) and bayonnaise (a creamy condiment made from oil and flesh from the baobab fruit).

(PS. Note the Jack Black beer on the counter – thanks to our artisinal brewers for keeping us refreshed during the talk.)

Mixed vegetable pickle, pickled eggs and delicious preserves

Oded shared some of his own secret ingredients and methods with us. For example, he finds Khoi San salt the best for brining. A Slow Food favourite too, this flaky pure sea salt is hand-harvested up the West Coast. Since most of his preserves and dishes have a Mediterranean flavour, Oded imports some of his ingredients, like his tahini. But you’ll understand why when you taste his amazing baba ganoush!

Dozens of strong, fresh flavours - washed down with Jack Black

Saturday’s little taster left us wanting more, so Slow Food Mother City will be arranging a full four-hour course with Oded in a few months’ time. If you have ideas of what you’d like to learn, or want to be notified of when the course is running, please e-mail info@slowfoodmothercity.co.za.

Quite a few of these chefs used local ingredients and techniques. A highlight was Grande Provence’s warm ballontine of Elgin free range chicken with white onion risotto (see moody photo below). Another winner was from Signal (at Cape Grace) – cumin-crusted springbok loin with a smoked potato and goat’s cheese samoosa, elegantly combining the soft, smoky venison with a glammed-up local favourite. Their dessert – a pistachio pavlova served with rooibos and honey ice-cream – was also divine.

Elgin free range chicken on compostable plates

World-renowned Margot Janse of Le Quartier Français complemented her braised lamb breast with white bean and buchu puree and apricot blatjang (chutney). Neil Jewel impressed as usual with his homegrown charcuterie and once unpopular (but very French) cuts like pork knuckle, pig’s cheek and tongue were proudly served by various restaurants. GOLD restaurant went all out on the local with Cape Malay curry, morog (traditional greens) and smoked snoek (as sustainable as it gets) on the menu. Even Nobu avoided the Japanese-traditional tuna for yellowtail sashimi.

All of these were beautifully plated on compostable crockery made from sugar cane bagasse – really outstanding, guys.

This year the zjooshy restaurants were complimented by small producers including Blue Sky Organics, with their various olive products; Willow Creek, with top-notch local olive oil; ever popular Pesto Princess; La Petite France and their true’s-bob camembert; By Nature, which stocks the best pistachios in South Africa, from the Northern Cape; and Get Stuffed with all their locally sourced cheeses. Also there was Oded’s Kitchen, with a wide range of preserves. Oded Schwartz will be hosting a preserving course for Slow Food Mother City on 10 April – why not sign up?

Lewis manning Oded's preserves stand

Oh, and we didn’t even mention the wine! With about 30 local estates represented, we can only marvel that we live in Cape Town, with so many great wines, red and white, grown and produced within 200kms of our homes. After all that, it was impossible to go home without a cappucino made from African Fair Trade beans from the Bean There stand – the perfect ending to a tasty evening.

Slow Food Mother City will be hosting an introduction to the pleasures of preserving with Oded Schwartz on 10 April.

Oded is South Africa’s leading expert on preserving (seriously, he wrote the book: Preserving, published by Dorling Kindersley in 1996, and translated into thirteen languages). He’s friendly and knowledgeable, and he’ll give you enough confidence to finally attempt a jam, or at least a chutney!

Join us for two hours of preserving history, theory, skills and tips, shared in a convivial atmosphere in Oded’s own kitchen. We’ll be tasting Oded’s preserves and pickles, and washing them down with Jack Black beer.

At this event, Oded will explain pickling techniques and science, give some history of pickling, offer samples for tasting, and answer your questions. No pickling will be DEMONSTRATED; we hope to offer a hands-on course with Oded in the near future, guided by participant feedback from this workshop.

EVENT DETAILS:

Date and time:
Saturday 10 April 2010. 3pm-5pm

Venue:
Oded’s Kitchen, The Old Biscuit Mill, 375 Albert Road, Salt River (why not stop by the Neighbourgoods Market beforehand?)

Cost:
R70 for members, R90 for guests

Bookings:
Space is limited (20pax), so if you would like to come, please email us at: events@slowfoodmothercity.co.za and let us know how many people you are bringing (and whether you are members or guests). We will then send you banking information to make your deposit and confirm your place/s.

First come, first served. If you have not made the deposit within 2 days of booking, we will make your space/s available to the next person in line. Please book before Thursday 7 March 2010.

Slow Food Mother City has organised a picnic lunch at Backsberg Estate on Saturday 27 March 2010, with a presentation on their environmental initiatives and some wine tasting (of course!).

Backsberg has been concerned with its environmental impact for a long time already, way before it became trendy.

Backsberg invested heavily in a carbon audit so that they could reach their goal of becoming carbon neutral. This goal was soon achieved, making them the first carbon neutral wine estate in South Africa and one of only three in the world.

Most of us enjoy a glass of wine on occasion (or often!), but most people don’t realise the impact of wine farming on the environment. The removal of fynbos to plant vineyards is one aspect of that. Backsberg is a member of the Biodiversity in Wine Initiative, setting aside part of the estate for conservation of fynbos.

Backsberg has also built an Earth Centre on the estate which serves as an education centre as well as offices for Food and Trees for Africa, who assist Backsberg with offsetting projects.

These are some of the initiatives that Backsberg has undertaken, but there are many more. For this reason Backsberg has won, and continues to win, many environmental awards both locally and abroad.

EVENT DETAILS

Date and time:
Saturday 27 March 2010. 11.00am

The schedule for our visit looks like this:

• 11h00: Arrival (refreshments served outside the Earth Centre)
• 11h00-12h00: Environmental Tour of the Estate with Simon Back
• 12h00-13h00: Wine Tasting in Historical Vat Cellar hosted by Cellar Door Manager, Danwin James
• 13h00: Finger Lunch outside the Earth Centre

The event is child friendly.

Cost:
The cost will be R80 for members, R85 for guests and R35 for children aged 3-12. Wine will be available for purchase to take home or enjoy with your picnic. Cool drinks will also be available for purchase.

Location:
Backsberg Wine Estate – www.backsberg.com

Bookings:
If you would like to come, please email us at: events@slowfoodmothercity.co.za and let us know how many people you are bringing (and whether you are members or guests). We will then send you banking information to make your deposit and confirm your place/s.

Directions:
From Cape Town: Take the N1 towards Paarl. Take Exit 47 – Klapmuts, Stellenbosch R44 offramp. At the Stop street turn right (underneath the N1 towards Stellenbosch). Go over the next 4-way stop and over the bridge. Take the next left on Franschhoek (R45). About 5km down that road on your right you’ll see Backsberg.

Event feedback

We’d love your feedback on our events! If you’ve attended a Slow Food Mother City event, please let us know what you thought by emailing events@slowfoodmothercity.co.za. All comments and suggestions are welcomed.