Cleaning out the Pantry

Hello and welcome/welcome back readers!  I know you are out there - I can see what country you are in and how many visits this blog has had so THANK YOU ALL for your encouragement. As I live in Australia this blog will  tend to follow the produce that is currently in season here.  For those of you in other parts of the world the same fresh produce may not be readily available locally but hopefully you will still be amused by my silly stories.
Over the Christmas holidays I decided that it was time to have a bit of a clean up in the pantry.  I found heaps of jars of home made olives that we preserved in April 2009.  Once again, these were obtained free of charge (from over the fence thanks to my friendly neighbour).  We did several varieties, some infused with red chilli, others with garlic and then a few with both garlic and red chilli.  They are the little skinny olives which have more seed than flesh.  I decided that they were taking up way too much room and we probably wouldn't eat them anyway so I had to convert them into something more compact.  I toyed with the idea of making olive and rosemary bread (both delicious and fattening) but that still needs to either be eaten within a few days or frozen (which takes up room in my freezer).  Back to square one. After much humming and haaing (is that a word?) I decided to make some black olive tapenade.  I unfortunately can't eat garlic as my body has a huge problem with digesting it (which for a foodie like myself poses a multitude of problems when dining out) so the garlic version was served to some visitors (which is another related story but not really the topic of this blog).  I distributed most of the tapenade to family members according to their tastes in chilli/garlic.  It is really easy to make so if you have an olive tree at your disposal you might like to harvest the olives at the appropriate time for where you live and follow the instructions on how to preserve olives and how to make a quick and easy tapenade.


Ciao for now