Curing olives

The black olives that I picked a week or so ago – see here – have been soaking in spring water since then and I’ve been changing the water every few days. Today it was time to salt them. Every time I cure olives I think I follow a slightly (or very) different method and this way is possible only because we have a very small crop – just over a kilo this year.

I drained the olives and cut a slit in each of them with a sharp knife.

 

Then I added a lot of coarse-grained sea salt – about 500 grams to the kilo of olives and mixed it in so that all the olives were coated with salt.

 

I added a layer of salt over them all and then covered the bowl with a large plate. I’ll leave them like this for a couple of weeks, draining off any liquid from time to time, until I taste an olive and find that it’s no longer bitter. Then they’ll be ready to cover with olive oil and store in jars until we eat them.

And mussels again

The Saturday morning visit of the coquillage van from Bouzigues gave me the chance to re-create a dish we had for lunch recently, made by our friends S & D in Montblanc, and also according to another friend available in at least one Barcelona bar. This is my version:

 

I chopped some of the last of our red and green peppers finely with two cloves of garlic and a piment d’Espelette and some basil leaves. I whizzed two small peeled tomatoes in the liquidiser with some olive oil, a pinch of salt and a dash of balsamic vinegar and mixed this dressing into the chopped vegetables.

 

Meanwhile, Lo Jardinièr was cooking the mussels with a glass of white wine until they all opened and removing the empty half of the shell. I put a spoonful of the pepper mixture into each mussel shell and we ate them with a squeeze of lemon, bread and a glass of local rosé.