BEWARE OF RAW OLIVES

PracticallyEdible.com/ saved my dinner tonight!   Linda at my fave green grocer had raw olives in packages yesterday, and I thought, “I HAVE to try them.”

My original idea was to pit and chop them and then saute them until they became caramelized.  Then, I’d add them to my tomato sauce.  I’d pitted and chopped a few and then I took a wee taste.  BITTER!  The raw olives were outrageously bitter.  I thought, well, perhaps cooking them will make them taste better.  My hopes to eat even more E.V.O. courtesy of the raw olives was, pardon the pun, dashed.

Just before I added them to my sauteed shallots, garlic and red peppers, I did what any foodie in 2010 ought to do.  I went to the FoodNetwork.com website.  No luck:  there was one recipe for pickled olives.

That’s when Google helped me find PracticallyEdible.com.  Raw olives are not only bitter, it takes either lye or salt and curing to pull the bitterness out!  And it didn’t take me a nano second to figure out that it was going to take me a lot longer than the 3 minutes it would take to finish my dish.

So I will see if I can find a recipe that is low salt and no lye either to cure my fresh olives instead.

PracticallyEdible.com is an encycleopeadic site that looks supercharged with info and great details for food lovers.  The site looks very well organized, and ought to be a joy to check out.

My only question is … what else is only practically edible?  Hmmm…Guess I’ll now get a chance to find out.