The other day I dropped in on my neighbors door just as they were making a pizza. Because my 85-year-old neighbor loves to tell stories, he told me how he'd kneaded the dough first thing in the morning, and recalled every single step of his pizza making including the number of olives - 27 - he'd used in the topping. That's when I noticed that his olives were all neatly pitted.
We've been picking olives from abandoned olive trees around here for a few years now, and have accumulated an impressive number of jars of olives in brine. Those jars are doing precisely that, I'm ashamed to say: just accumulating, without being eaten really. The local olives here, of the Taggiasca variety, are quite small and slender - basically pits padded out with a little olive flesh. Which makes them a little difficult to use, when you have hungry kids who like their food in nice plump bites.
I asked my neighbor where they kept their magic pitless olive tree. My neighbor laughed, and showed me the coolest kitchen tool ever: a garlic press with a little cup under the garlic area, where you drop in an olive, squeeze the handle, and ecco fatto, out pops the pit. You can even pit your olive and press some garlic all in one go. This device is totally new to me. Have you ever seen anything like it before?
I borrowed it, and in no time I'd pitted all of our 2009 olives.
Later on, as I was baking a pizza and a focaccia with pitted olives, and was getting ready to throw away the pits, Tom suggested that olive pits, which are both woody and oily, might make a good fire-starter. How many new olive discoveries can you make in one day?!
