I think that I can safely say that no one saw this coming down the pike. Fueled by the wild enthusiasm of Jonathan "I'm Allergic To Grass" Poritz, we are apparently going all-in as olive farmers.

We thought the olive harvest would be finished by now -- and perhaps it is on the big farms where whole crews of people descend like locusts for the harvest and pick the trees clean. But here at the rustic farmhouse where it is just the two of us, the trees are still bent under their burden and we find that we are once again in the olive brining business. It is simply impossible to walk past trees loaded with plump, ripe olives and turn away. Jonathan, in his zeal, has even gotten out the ladder that Mimmo keeps in the laundry room. I do not believe that even Mimmo himself has ever resorted to such extremes.

"Just look at these!" Jonathan says to me from his perch up among the branches. I go and look. And they are some very plump olives indeed.

Olives straight off the tree are unpleasant, inedible -- bitter-tasting and wooden. But brining olives is an old, old process, going back millennia, and requires nothing but water, salt, olives, and time. We have them all.

First, you wash the olives and discard any with worm holes or other weirdness. Then you soak the olives covered in salt water. We do this in big covered soup tureens, which this rental house has in inexplicable abundance. (Who has been eating so much soup? Who has been serving it in tureens? Who has been eating so much soup that it necessitates multiple tureens? Life here is very strange.) For the first two or three weeks, you change the old salt water for fresh salt water every day to get rid of the bitter tannins and soften the olive flesh. (Big commercial olive factories do this with lye because it is faster, but it also makes a much inferior olive. We are quite haughty in our disdain of such ersatz olive practices.) That is the First Brine.

For the Second Brine, you leave the olives to sit in a mixture made out of one liter of water and 100 grams of salt. You leave them untouched like that for two or three months. We do this in storage jars that we bought at IKEA for just this purpose because even this house eventually runs out of soup tureens.

 

Then after the two or three months is up, you add flavorings - spices, garlic, whatever -- and you are ready to eat them. We make them in batches as big as pretty full soup tureens. At the moment, we have four batches in their Second Brine sitting quietly on shelves in the cantina and three batches having their First Brine here in the house with a fourth batch gleaming in Jonathan "After All, New Jersey Is the Garden State" Poritz's eye.

What will will do with these gallons and gallons of olives when they are ready to eat next February is anyone's guess. Although nothing really says, "Happy Valentine's Day, my love!" like a meal made entirely of garlic-infused olives.