Food I'm Eating: Fast, Easy, Adaptable Six-ingredient Pasta

If you're tired of your own cooking and looking for something super easy to make for lunch or dinner, here's a recipe I like because it's tasty, easy, and fast--you can prepare it in the time it takes the pasta to boil. Only six ingredients are required, but you can make additions and substitutions.

Ingredients: 

1. Black olives (fresh, pitted--not those horrid little black tires they put on pizza at the big pizza chains)

2. Capers 

3. Anchovies (the kind in the jar, not a can (although those work in a pinch): I like the Agostina Recca brand)

4. Fresh garlic 

5. Chili flakes (I like chipotle flakes) 

6. Fresh parmesan cheese (shaved, not the powdered Kraft stuff) 

7. (Optional): Baby spinach, snow peas, other greens

Directions: 

Boil water for pasta. While waiting for the water, chop the olives, capers, anchovies, and garlic finely but not too finely. Set aside.

When water is boiling, add the pasta. If you normally salt your pasta water, in this case don't: the olives, capers, cheese, and anchovies provide plenty of saltiness.

In a large skillet, heat a little olive oil and butter. When the butter is melted, add the olives, anchovies, capers, and chili flakes. Stir. Reserve the garlic and parmesan cheese. Turn down the heat.

About four minutes before the pasta will be ready, make a space in the skillet for the garlic, turn up the heat again (medium-high) and add the garlic and more butter so that the garlic sautés in the butter. Make sure the garlic doesn't burn. Turn down heat if necessary after the garlic takes a little color, which should be just before the pasta is ready. If you add greens, put these in along with the garlic so that they're just cooked as the pasta finishes.

When pasta is ready, drain and add to the pan with the other ingredients. Turn off the heat and mix well. Last, add the Parmesan cheese. The residual heat will melt it. Serve immediately!

I like to make this with baby spinach, which adds some nice color. If you're a vegetarian, you can omit the anchovies. If you don't like spicy foods, omit the chili flakes. If you like things spicier, this works well with fresh minced jalapeño or Fresno peppers (or hotter varieties, if you like). The photo here shows it with snow pea pods instead of spinach. Dinner last night. :)

Foods I'm Eating: 2019-2020 Season Homemade Olives

Just about 100 days ago (November 10, 2019) I started a batch of olives curing. Yesterday I was finally able to bottle them. These took much longer than any I've made in the past, but, by going through my own posts here about olive-making, I see that I started these much earlier than any I've done in the past. Presumably, the riper the fruit, the faster they cure. In the past, it's taken six to eight weeks for the olives to finish curing, but using olives harvested as late as mid-February—that is, harvested right about now.

Anyway, after more than three months, we have fresh homemade olives again. As in the past, I've done them up with rosemary, a bay leaf, a quarter lemon, and garlic. I like to put them in a shallow dish to soak a little in olive oil with more garlic, lemon, and rosemary before eating them, too. Delicious.

Food I'm Eating: Brining Olives (November 2019)

Olives! For the first time in several years I've been able to get my hands on some healthy, ripe olives for brining. It's a pretty easy process, although a bit tedious at the outset because you have to break the skin of each and every berry. That means scoring each olive with a knife blade before soaking them in brine. I use 1/4 cup of kosher salt to a quart of water and change the brine every two to three days. It takes about six weeks for the bitterness of the just-picked olives to disappear. Towards the end, I add vinegar, garlic, and rosemary to the brine to finish them off. These should be ready for Christmas. I started them on November 10.

Food I'm Eating: Green Olives (March 2017)

I've been making black olives at home for the past few years now, making batches whenever able to get my hands on good olives. I'd never tried green olives before, but this year I had access to a tree that still had green fruit in January, so I thought I'd give it a go. They are now done. The process was much the same as for black olives, but I started with a plain water soak for about ten days, changing the water every day, before switching to brine with a change every three or four days. I finished them with just a little bay, lemon juice, and white wine vinegar added toward the end, mostly the vinegar. I've always brined the black olives from the start and finished them with garlic, lemon, and rosemary. Both methods have resulted in some pretty tasty olives. Green olives seem to finish more quickly than black olives, suggesting the ripe fruit has more of the bitter compounds that make unprocessed olives inedible.

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).

Food I'm Eating: Sparkling Olives, Anyone? (March 30, 2013)

About a week ago I bottled up the first of two batches of olives I've been making. These are a small variety from a tree that grows in our garden. The second batch is still in the brine stage. They are larger olives from a neighbor's tree that take longer to lose their bitterness. I was looking at the bottled olives yesterday and noticed that the metal lids of the mason jars I used looked somewhat puffy. Suspicious, I opened one and found a fairly vigorous fermentation going on.

Carbonated olives? A bit strange, but the bubbles dissipated overnight (I left the jars open). The olives do have a slight prickle, however. Not unpleasant and the flavor otherwise is great, but I wonder what happened? I did NOT refrigerate the jars after closing them. Perhaps I should have. Perhaps the brine they are packed in was too weak? I decided to add a teaspoon of wine vinegar and a teaspoon of salt to each of the jars and I put them in the refrigerator this time. I hope the fermentation stops. I need an olive guru to tell me what's going on....

In the meantime, I keep eating them.

Food I'm Eating: Olives 2013 (March 5, 2013)

The olives are coming along nicely. They've been in brine for going on a month now. I started them on February 10. Two years ago when I made olives I simply brined them. This year, following a recipe my neighbor used, I left them in brine for the first three weeks, but a few days ago I drained them and put them in containers with new brine, substituting a quarter cup of red wine vinegar for some of the water and added lemons, bay leaves, and a mix of herbs, including rosemary, thyme, marjoram, and savory--in a typical herbs de Provence sort of blend. The rosemary is from the garden. The smaller olives (I used two varieties, one from our own tree, one from a neighbor's tree) are nearly ready. In fact, I may transfer them back to plain brine sooner rather than later so they don't take on too much of the vinegar character. The larger ones are still somewhat bitter and will require another week or so. The brining seems to take about five to six weeks. So far, they look (and taste) very promising. To see the original post on this blog about this year's olives or about making olives in past years, search on "olives" in the search box.

Food I'm Eating: Olives (2013)

I picked olives from our tree the day before yesterday, hoping to repeat the success I had two years ago making olives for the first time. Last year most olives trees in the area produced virtually no fruit. Olives seem to alternate heavy crops and it rained heavily during flowering last year as well. Picking now was a bit late. The fruit appears more than optimally ripe (a lot has fallen and what was left on the tree was beginning to shrivel a little). On the upside, the olives are somewhat bigger than two years ago, when I picked in mid-January. My neighbor's tree is a much better variety, with bigger, meatier fruits. They allowed me to take what was left on their tree as well.

So, I have about eight quarts or so of two varieties (both unknown) now soaking in brine, using the same solution I used two years ago (a quarter cup of kosher salt to one quart of water). I slit the olives with a knife before brining them, as the recipes instruct. The break in the skin allows the salt to soak in and the bitter components in the olives to leach out. We'll see how it goes.... Meanwhile, my hard cider is still bubbling away on day 11 of fermentation. Testing the liquid, it tastes of alcohol, but is still slightly sweet. I'm guessing it will take another five to six days or so for the fermentation to go to completion. Then I'll need to rack the cider a couple of times to clear it of solids and then bottle it, dosing it with a touch of sugar before putting the caps on, which will cause a secondary fermentation in the bottle, adding that touch of carbonation that makes a good cider refreshing--that's the theory anyway. Cider is a new realm of exploration for me.

Food I'm Eating: The Olive Project Continued (January-February 2011)

It's been just over three weeks now since I determined to try to make olives--eating olives, that is--from the bitter black fruit on our backyard olive tree. I went into the project with a fair amount of skepticism, having tasted unpleasant homemade olives in the past. Tasting my efforts now after three weeks in brine, I'm pleasantly surprised. The bitterness is all gone. The olives have a nice fruity quality. Best of all, it was a rather easy thing to do. My only reservation is that they taste a little saltier than I would like. I wonder how you regulate the saltiness? That seems rather hit or miss. Perhaps by adjusting the brine? I used 1/4 cup of salt for each quart of water. Nevertheless, I'm inspired to do another batch already.

These will sit in the brine another week or so, then I'll package them (in jars, still in the brine, with a layer of olive oil on top. They're supposed to keep that way for a month or two).

My original post on the subject of making olives

The olives before starting their soak in brine (left: each berry has been scored with a knife blade, to allow the brine to penetrate; below, the more-or-less finished product).

Food I'm Eating: The Olive Project (January 2011)

There are two olive trees in my garden. One I planted, the other was here when I arrived. The one that came from a nursery bears no fruit. The one already here was a mere bush ten years ago. Somehow it turned into a tree while I wasn't paying attention. It's now about 30 feet high and this year, for the first time I can remember, it's heavily laden with small purplish black fruits--olives. The optimists of the world say that if life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade. Given fresh olives, I decided I should make olive oil or proper olives for eating. Making olive oil requires equipment that I don't have and large quantities of olives reduce to rather small amounts of oil, it seems, so curing the olives for eating made more sense. Having made that decision, I had to admit to myself that I had no idea how to transform a terribly bitter, astringent, fresh olive (ever bit into a fresh olive?) into one of those tasty salty orbs we all know and love.

I did have some idea, actually. Rightly or wrongly, I seemed to think that making olives involved lye and salt, but I wasn't exactly sure. Not that long ago, I would have headed to the library at this point, but I turned instead to the Internet and learned there are four principal ways to make olives--more if you count some of the variations. Fresh olives can simply be soaked for weeks in water. With daily changes of the water, bitter components leach out of the fruit to yield an edible product. But that seemed too simple. No romance in that.

At the other extreme is the method involving lye. Essentially, lye accelerates the result that water achieves--removal of the bitter components (mostly phenolic compounds and the glycoside oleuropein, according to Wikipedia). Somehow lye seems as unromantic as plain water, though--and dangerous to boot--so I rejected that idea. The other two methods rely on salt. Fresh olives can be simply packed dry in salt for long periods or they can be soaked in brine. As this last method seemed easiest, I opted to try brine-curing the small black olives the tree in the garden produces.

After picking several pounds of olives, I went back to the Internet and more carefully read the directions I'd found for making brine-cured olives. I was a bit annoyed at myself when I read that the skin of each olive must be broken. I wouldn't have picked so many if I had imagined making an incision in the side of each of the 800 small olives I had to process, but it turned out to be relatively easy work, taking only about an hour.

I made a brine solution of 1/4 cup salt to one quart of water and dumped it over the olives, which I had washed once (enough brine to ensure that all the olives were submerged). I covered the container and set it aside. Yesterday, after three days (stirring the solution and the olives once a day), the cover suddenly popped off. The olives had started fermenting. I hadn't read anything about fermentation or allowing gases to escape, so I assumed fermentation was not a good thing and added more salt in the hope of stopping it. Reading more today, I see that it's normal and the container is not supposed to be tightly sealed. In any case, the fermentation seems to have slowed. There is less bubbling going on. I'm not sure that has anything to do with the extra salt or not. I have no idea whether the water is now too salty, but I'll be changing it in a couple of days anyway. My recipe says that curing the olives will take about six weeks (with the brine renewed once a week). Already the olives are more palatable than they were fresh, so, I'm optimistic. Now, it's just a waiting game..... Stay tuned.

[Update: The Olive Project--Continued]