The Good Food and Wine Show

The Good Food and Wine Show was at the convention center in Cape Town this weekend. At first, I hadn't wanted to go since I'm vegan and currently gluten-free. Gourmet food tends to be meat and dairy centered, with vegetables as either an after-thought or an enhancer, not the centerpiece. But food is a high value for both Jared and I. We eat well and very healthy and spend a fair amount of time in the preparation of food. So we really like food... It's a bit more than that actually, if we aren't preparing food, eating, or cleaning up from cooking, then we are thinking about food.

We decided to go to the show. The show was a cross between cooking demos like the Food Network channel (I always think of my friend Ae-young with cooking demos, the Food Network used to be her favorite TV channel), booths demonstrating nifty cooking tools like at the USA Oregon State Fair, samples, and wine. This being wine country around Cape Town, about 30% of the fair was different vineyards offering wine tastings of their wine. And it was free tastings! I didn't come anywhere near close to sampling them all, knowing when I reached my limit after the fortified wine booth... that red muscadel was so good, followed by the white muscadel, then the port and then the sherry. There is something so smooth about good fortified wine.

I was also delighted to find one organic vineyard that also had a low sulfite content. Apparently, all wines have a certain amount of naturally occurring sulfites that are a result of the fermentation process, but many conventional winemakers add sulfur dioxide as a preservative. According to Organic Wine Company (http://ecowine.com/sulfites) sulfur dioxide has been added to wines for 200 years. This website says many people have a low tolerance for sulfites, Jared is one of these people, so its great to find wine that doesn't have a lot of sulfites.

Cape Town has a big Muslim population so one corner of the fair was dedicated to Halaal booths. We had some veggie curry from one of them, they put the curry into this little metal-looking container and then popped it into the microwave. Jared got really nervous expecting sparks or the micro to blow up, but apparently they are special micro containers, so there was no fireworks. I was reminded of freshman year in college when the guys would put CDs into the microwaves until they cracked and the microwave turned black inside and the room smelt bad. Can't remember why this was supposed to be cool.

We finally left the show once we had been there for 6 hours and they were closing the place down. Yeah food!