Miscellaneous: Feeling grateful

A fairly typical meal at home. Asparagus grilled with olive oil and sea salt. Pasta with a sauce made from leftover fish, sautéed onion and Swiss Chard with white truffle oil. A salad of lettuce, arugula, and spinach, all from the garden. Soon, the tomatoes, too will be from the garden. A rosé of Sangiovese and Cabernet Franc from Washington. In a few months, the rosé will be from our own backyard vineyard. The three salt dishes were made by local potter John Chambers. The asparagus sits on a plate made by Gina Kuta, another local potter (both live and work in Sebastopol). Just outside of the frame is a large bouquet of flowers just picked from outside the kitchen door in a pot thrown in the 1950s by my late mother. 

I feel very lucky to live here and to have all the things that I enjoy every day. I take none of it for granted. 

Food I'm Eating: Curing Green Olives (January 2017)

I've cured ripe black olives in the past, olives from the tree in our yard and from a neighbor's tree, but never tried to cure green olives before. Usually olives are starting to ripen here as early as October, depending on variety, and nearly all are fully ripe by December. I had access this year to a number of trees at a winery tasting room where I work part-time. One of the trees has green fruit even now. I don't know what variety it is, but I decided to try green olives.

Recipes for curing black olives with brine always start with salt water from day one. Most green olive recipes, however, recommend soaking the olives in fresh water to start and then finishing them in brine. Recommended water soaks seem to range from four days to a month, with many recipes recommending 10 days. I'll probably seek a middle path and try waiting about two weeks before switching to brine. We'll see what happens. In the meantime, large ripe olives from another tree at the tasting room were already looking good in early November. Those olives are now finishing in brine with a touch of vinegar, lemon juice, rosemary and several crushed cloves of garlic. They are just about ready (below).

On the Road (Europe 2010): Cardona, Spain

Yesterday spent the day in the Cardona area, visiting the main local attraction, which is the mountain of salt that first made this area prosperous. The mine in the folded mountain formation is no longer active, but you can tour part of the old works, which allows you to see some of the tunnels miners used, but, more interestingly, it allows you to see the salt formations in detail. Mining in this area goes back to neolithic times and the Romans extracted salt here as well. It wasn't until fairly recently that vertical shafts were dug into the deposit to mine it.

There are only three places in the world where salt deposits have been folded vertically into a mountain. One is in Colombia, one is in Romania, and one is here. The deposits originated in an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that once covered most of Catalonia. They are about 40 million years old. Stained with iron oxide, they are mostly shades of brown and orange, but fresh crystals of white sodium chloride (common table salt) have formed on the surface of the ancient deposits in many areas because of water seepage. There are impressive salt stalactites in places.

At least three kinds of salt are present, sodium chloride (halite), potassium-magnesium chloride, (carnalite), and another, that I've forgotten the name of that is mostly potassium chloride. The carnalite crystals were especially pretty, looking like topaz and in some places like the stone carnelian (the names share a root, of course; carne, or "meat," which is appropriate as some of the ubiquitous Spanish hams look rather like carnelian, too).

Commercial mining in the 20th century seems to have focused on extracting potassium salts. The unwanted sodium chloride was dumped next to the natural formation. In the first photo here, the ancient folded salt dome is the area of exposed cliffs. The flat area with machinery on it and the area just behind that is the dumped mine waste that is itself now being "strip mined" for sodium chloride for industrial applications. Worth a visit.