I was noting the other day how frequently we use olives as an ingredient. Is that something lots of people do? I don’t know. But I thought maybe people who like olives might enjoy these ways to use them. Mr pixxer and I have a running theme that a lot of things we use as ingredients are just very flavorful versions of salt, and olives are among these - as are capers, anchovies, and of course many cheeses (parmigiano, anyone?)
All the olives we use are brine- or oil-packed. None is salt-cured, a treatment I find too harsh for my taste. In many cases, you can change which olive you use, and of course will have a different-tasting dish, which is fun. We have an outstanding olive bar at my fantastic grocery, but I’ve even seen a good one at Safeway recently, so I think olive sources are becoming more common.
tl;dr summary:
- Marinating olives for party food (quick, easy!)
- Spaghetti alla Puttanesca (quick, easy!)
- Three tapenades and three ways to use them (pasta, pizza, pizza)
- A simple salad I made up (quick! easy!)
- Links to olivey things I’ve blogged on WFD before
Marinated Olives with Lemon, Thyme, and Red Pepper Flakes
(from Dean and DeLuca, The Food and Wine Cookbook, by Jeff Morgan)
You can buy marinated olives in olive bars and in jars and such, but I rarely find any that are not too vinegary for my taste. This simple marinade lets the olive taste shine, while adding a nice brightness.
This is actually enough marinade for more that a cup of olives — sometimes I refill the bowl with more olives and toss them in the leftovers.
I use picholine olives with pits for this.
In a small bowl, toss together:
- 1 cup unpitted firm green olives
- 2 Tbsp EVOO
- 1 Tbsp grated lemon zest [Use organic lemons or “pesticide free” for this!]
- ¼ tsp red pepper flakes.
Let stand 15 minutes at room temperature. [We prefer to leave it for longer, if possible.]
Spaghetti alla Puttanesca
(from The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces, by Diane Seed)
We LOVE this recipe! I’ve shown what we make for 2 people; it’s 1/3 of the original recipe, and enough for a scant 1/3 pound (about 5 oz) spaghetti. Cook the spaghetti as you normally would. The rest can be done while the water heats and pasta cooks. Notes in [ ] show the original instructions where our recipe differs.
This could be vegetarian if you leave out the anchovy, but you’d need something tangy and salty to substitute for the strong flavor.
In 1/2 Tbsp olive oil, cook 1 clove finely chopped garlic and one chopped anchovy filet; cook gently “until they are almost melted.”
Stir in 1/3 of a 14 oz can of diced tomatoes including juice [‘Italian plum tomatoes”], 1/3 cup pitted black olives (such as Niçoise or Gaeta), chopped, and 1 Tbsp+1 tsp capers (chopped or whole, as you prefer).
Cook 5 minutes.
Drain the spaghetti (pour some of the water into the serving bowls to heat them) toss with the sauce, and serve sprinkled with chopped flatleaf (Itaian) parsley.
Tapenades — Olives, crushed, with other flavors added
Pasta with Green Beans and Tapenade
Mr pixxer usually just walks to the fridge, pulls stuff out and cooks something and it’s great, but occasionally he uses a recipe. This is one of his specialties, from Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza, and Calzone, by Alice Waters et al. It’s a remarkable combination — the kind of thing I, at least, would never think to do — but it totally works, and we love it.
Mr pixxer makes the tapenade using a mortar and pestle, according to the recipe below. Once that is done, the dish is almost complete. This quantity is half of the published recipe, so as to serve two. This can also be vegetarian if you leave out/substitute for the anchovy, which many tapenades do.
Roughly chop 1 large or 2 small cloves of fresh garlic, and pound to a paste with mortar and pestle. Pit 2 dozen Gaeta olives. (If you are not able to find these, Niçoise or even Kalamata will work ok.) Rinse and filet ¾ salt-cured anchovy (YMMV), and chop it up a bit. Add the olives and anchovies to the mortar and pound them with the garlic. Stir in 1/6 cup (2Tbsp + 2tsp) EVOO (=extra virgin olive oil) and a dash of cognac and stir to blend.
Meanwhile, heat water, salted, to cook the pasta. While it is heating, wash, top and tail a “large handful” of thin green beans —
French filet beans if you can get them (see photo above for Mr pixxer’s interpretation of the quantity). Cook the beans in the pasta water for about 2 minutes, or until tender but still slightly crunchy. Remove the beans from the water, then cook 2 servings (4-5 oz total) pasta (originally linguine; Mr p just uses spaghetti) till al dente. Drain the pasta, using the hot water to heat serving bowls.
The original recipe says mix beans with tapenade on warm serving dish, then add cooked pasta and toss. Mr pixxer just serves the beans and tapenade separately over the spaghetti and we mix a bit before eating.
Pizza with Tapenade, Roasted Red Pepper and Onions
(from The Cheese Board Collective Works — a perfectly marvelous double-entendre title)
The Cheese Board is a collective that has not only survived, but thrived, from its start in 1971, when the original owners, after 4 years, sold the business to their employees. Their cheese selection is voluminous, their prices are excellent, and you can taste multiple versions of anything before buying it. Cheese heaven!
Their pizza collective is semi-separate, but connected (you can buy light-bake pizzas in the cheese shop next door) and their cookbook has re
cipes from the cheese shop/bakery and pizza collective both. Their pizza crusts are all sourdough, and mine are not, so I don’t really replicate their pizzas; but I do love the toppings. CB food is entirely vegetarian — but, obviously, not remotely vegan!
For one pizza, about 13” in diameter, this is what I use:
[Here’s my crust recipe, in case you’re looking for one. Has a few tips, too.]
Pre-prep:
Tapenade: In a small food processor or blender (or mortar with pestle), mix 1/3 cup pitted Kalamata olives, 1 Tbsp EVOO (plus more to texture), 1/16 tsp (“pinch”) red pepper flakes, and 1/16 tsp freshly ground black pepper, and process “till almost smooth.” (I leave mine a bit choppy. Whatever :) Add more olive oil if needed.
Garlic oil: Mince 1 clove garlic, and mix with 1 Tbsp EVOO.
Slice half a large yellow onion and one seeded red bell pepper into 1/8” slices.
Prepare about 3 Tbsp finely chopped parsley.
Grate 4 oz part-skim mozzarella (I usually put this off and do it during the 1 ½ minutes the crust is in pre-cook, so the cheese doesn’t re-form into a mass. Also note: this is about half what the original recipe calls for!)
Crumble 2ish oz sheep’s-milk feta (I usually use Bulgarian. Also, I leave the crumbling to the end and do it right onto the pizza.)
Cooking:
Preheat the oven to 450F to roast the veggies.
Toss the bell pepper and onion slices with 1 Tbsp EVOO, and spread out on a parchment-lined baking tray. Bake at 450 for 5 to 8 minutes, till the peppers “are wilted and give off their liquid.” Remove from the oven.
[I use a pizza stone, and bake the pizza at 500. You can also cook it longer and cooler and without a stone. The linked crust recipe above has some minor notes on this.]
At this point, I raise the oven temp to 500F, then pre-cook the crust 1.5 minutes, then remove the crust from the oven and top the pizza.
[While the crust cooks, you can grate 4 oz part-skim mozzarella.]
Brush the slightly-cooked crust with the garlic oil. Scatter on about 2/3 of the mozzarella, then the roasted onions and red pepper, then the rest of the mozz. Sprinkle/crumble on the sheep’s-milk feta, and bake till the crust is done (under my conditions, about 5 minutes more). Remove from the oven and dot with “pea-sized” bits of tapenade, and sprinkle with the minced parsley.
Pizza with potatoes, roasted red pepper, and tapenade
(from epicurious.com)
This pizza has a lot of pre-prep (boil potatoes, make tapenade, roast red pepper), but is so worth the effort! Since this is getting to be a really long diary, I’ll just link to the blog post that I work from when I make this pizza. It’s a great pizza for winter, when, for some reason, we get a lot of red peppers. The chopped rosemary over the top is a crowning glory.
Here’s the original on Epicurious.
Here’s my recipe for it, for about a 13” pizza.
That’s the weirdest shape my pizza ever turned out. :)
I’m copying the tapenade portion of the recipe here, since this post is about the olives:
Make tapenade: Pit 12 Gaeta olives. Cut up one small clove of garlic and half an anchovy (I used oil-packed from Costco), and either pound in a mortar, or mix in a food processor, with 1 Tbsp olive oil.
Salads:
Of course, any time you make a tossed salad you can add in some olives. But here is a very simple salad I thought up that features the olives “up front.”
I came up with this combination ages ago and it immediately became a staple. One of those “Hm — I bet this would taste good” things that worked. No doubt others have also invented it, since it’s so simple.
Avocado and olive salad
You can adjust proportions to your fancy, and you can use some variations of greens and dressing, but the fundamentals are:
Perfectly ripe avocado: from ¼ to ½ Haas avocado per serving — either cut into chunks, as at left, or make lengthwise wedges out of it.
Olives: I most often use Niçoise olives for this salad, but green picholines are also great. Pit the olives if they didn’t come pitted, and halve them or cut into pieces that appeal to you. Use something like 8 (6-12) small olives per serving.
Make a bed of torn lettuce on a lunch-sized plate. More often than not, I use plain romaine, but a young-greens mix works fine. A bit of baby arugula can’t hurt. So long as the lettuces don’t fight with the main attraction, it works.
Strew or arrange the avocado pieces over the lettuce. Distribute the olive pieces around the salad.
The dressing should be simply EVOO and red wine vinegar, or EVOO and fresh-squeezed lemon juice, 3:1 or 4:1 ratio to taste, with salt and freshly ground pepper. Whisk to an even consistency, taste and balance the flavors, and drizzle carefully over the salad.
Finally, here are two olivey things I included in past WFDs:
So — you know the question:
What’s for dinner at your house?
Also, if you would enjoy writing a diary for the WFD series, reply to ninkasi23’s comment below, or kosmail her to discuss a good date for your story.
17:43PT ETA Tbsp/tsp amounts to pasta recipe.