3 ½ more days until the end of Dog Watching Detail. While Ginger (left) and Morgan (right) are lovely and well-behaved Poochies, I cannot get home fast enough to get ready for my trip ...in 4 days.
Weekend Herb Blogging is being hosted this week by Ulrike, of Kuchenlatein. This week, as I ave been saying all week, has been an interesting cooking week so I don't have my kitchen. As I am looking for easy recipes with few bowls/tools, I decided to contribute Olive Tapenade.
First, I was going to type out a bunch of things I have read about olives, but Whole Foods has a great online guide, For the Love of Olives, that says things well. But, in addition, here are some other random tidbits, from Food Reference,
Olives are not edible, green or ripe, and must be treated with lye and/or cured in brine or dry salt before being edible. They contain about 20% oil.
They are strong tasting because they are just packed in dry salt, or pickled in brine for 6 to 12 months (where they undergo a process of
lactic fermentation), and finally packed in fresh brine.
Olive trees may live to be 1500 years old, the average life span is about 500 years.
California is the only state where olives are grown commercially.There
are 500 million olive trees in Europe, and 50 million in California. California produces less than 5% of the world crop, but it produces more than 70% of the ripe olives consumed in the U.S.
Ten medium size black olives have 50 calories and 4 grams of fat.
Olive TapenadeFor 4
1 clove of chopped garlic
2 cups whole, pitted Kalamata olives
one 2-oz. can anchovy fillets, rinsed
2 Tbsp. capers
1 tsp. chopped fresh thyme
1 tsp. chopped fresh rosemary
3 Tbsp. lemon juice
4 Tbsp. olive oil
Place all of the ingredients, except for the olive oil, in a blender or food processor. Slowly add the olive oil as you blend into a paste.
Serve tapenade with pita bread, on a ham/turkey burger, or as a filling in (a hollowed out) grape/cherry tomatoes, an endive leaf. Slightly heat the tapenade and treat it like a pesto by adding it to pasta. If you do add it to pasta, depending on the amount of oil in your recipe, you may want to add more olive oil, or some water if necessary.
Note: (1) Since I don't need enought tapenade to feed a small army, I halved the recipe, except the garlic (2) Normally, I would have pulsed carefully instead of running the processor because I like my tapenade chunky and not in paste. But, since I didn't want to use the processor here...I chopped....and I chopped....and I chopped. (3) I leave out the anchovies….not a fan.
4 Comments:
This is something I love to eat but have never made myself. I think I'd love to try making it. And I would add a bit of anchovy paste, just to be adventurous.
By the way, I'm guessing you don't subscribe to your own blog on rss. Did you know that your blog title shows up as just a period, no words at all. (This is in Bloglines; I'm not sure about other feed readers.) I'm not sure why, but you might want to check on it. Not that it matters to me, because now I know it's you, but it might confuse some people.
I just had to say;"cute poochies". I have three cats and one is named Ginger.
I like to make tapenade myself it's so much better and at least cheaper than to buy it. Thanks for your entry.
Thanks Kalyn! I like making Tapenade myself because I find the store bought very salty. And, thanks about the RSS feed - I will follow your advice in our email exchange. ;)
Thanks Julie! I have to say - Ginger is fabulous. She loves me, so it makes it fun. Your cat must be fab too, with a name like Ginger.
I agree Ulrike! It is a whole lot cheaper to make Tapenade at home.
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