olives

Epic Failure: Curing and Brining Olives

As with many things I write about, I have no idea what possessed me to believe that I should cure olives. Isn't our tiny house and our tiny kitchen already stuffed with my experiments (in progress now: plum wine, hard cider, salted liver)?

Olives weren't even premeditated. I saw them in the produce section looking kind of sickly. The conversation with myself went something like this:

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Pintxos!

We had a lovely brunch with Dianne and Jim this morning - I love Serafina for breakfast. There's nothing like a steaming hot plate of polenta patties (they called them gnocchi) with tangy tomato sauce to start the day.

We worked in the yard a while while the weather was lovely, and when we were done, we decided to cook a little snack at home. We'd watched an episode of Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie featuring Jose Andres (whose show on PBS we watch regularly too) and realized we had everything we needed in the house to create a perfect pintxos fest.

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Quinoa, Green Olive, and Tomato Terrine

In the spirit of trying new things, we pulled this recipe from our new Stephane Reynaud book, Terrine. And in full disclosure I must say, this recipe has no pork!

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Chicken with Olives and Preserved Lemons

This recipe came courtesy of David Waltuck's excellent Staff Meals cookbook from Chanterelle. Todd's uncle Bruce Schmiechen gave this to us as a gift last holiday and this is our first meal with it. We served it with couscous and lima beans and a little bread to soak up the juices.

The chicken came courtesy of Dave and Rebecca Buchert's farm! This recipe is intended to serve 6 - 8, so I have reproduced the recipe in the cookbook exactly. We varied the sizes a little because there's just two of us.

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