Saturday, October 23

Olive us love them!

Every October we look forward to the abundance of big, gorgeous olives from our four trees. This year we have a problem to contend with—some bug has been biting the fruit and leaving a mark. We picked a few quarts of olives and ran them through our normal processing and found that the bug bites don’t affect the quality of the finished product. The olives just have a tiny bit of that mouse-eaten, rat-chewed, bashed, pummeled-by-meteorites, shot-by-vandals look. Otherwise they taste great. Just don’t look at what you’re eating.

This afternoon Karla and I picked half a bucket-full. I dumped in a gallon of sodium hydroxide-infused dihydrogen monoxide to start the multi-part procedure that ends in edible olives. There are so very many olives left on the trees since we only picked the low-hanging fruit. Our main limitation is rounding up enough jars and lids so we can pack them and start distributing them to friends and neighbors.

It is so hugely satisfying to receive this gift of nature every year. We figured that we had planted the trees about 25 years ago. They were probably two or three years old then, so they have at least another thousand years of productive life. Some trees in the Mediterranean are supposed to be 2,000 to 3,000 years old according to this Wikipedia entry. I hope I don’t have to process olives for that long; I could get really tired of dealing with dihydrogen monoxide and sodium hydroxide.

And that’s no lye.

7 comments:

Pete S. said...

Tom, you crack me up!

Agneta and David said...

We need some of those olives. Can you deliver?

Tom Hurley said...

David, you're on! We have your weirdly spelled goofy Swedish address with all the ö's, and will try to make a label that'll get you some genuine California olives. Let's hope the US Postal Service will accept labels with umlauts and little "o"s above "a"s and stuff. In exchange, you can send us some Swedish banana plants.

Anonymous said...

Mom learned how to process olives after she tried a "ripe" one off the first olive tree she had ever seen.

HHhorses said...

Do you deliver to Death Valley?

Susan Hurley-Luke said...

How about an order from Australia?

Tom Hurley said...

Susan, Hilary, you're on. I am currently working on appropriate labels. Expect delivery before Xmas.