Olives and super chili peppers, oh my!

Whoops...... I'm back!

Bought these puppies at Trader Joe's this morning. Can't be anything bad about them, right!?

I love that they have an Ode to Olives [pdf] on their site. 




As an aside, Flickr's new photo page really blows.

So also, I've been growing some plants on my balcony. Some have been more successful than others. A few months ago, my poor super chili (yes that's the name of the variety) fell off the balcony onto the ground below, but I was able to save it. I've been harvesting a few peppers off of it (they're REALLY spicy), but just in the last week, the thing decided to explode with flowers. If you look at the original version, you can see that there are literally a hundred soon-to-be peppers. I've been chopping them and freezing them so I have chili peppers ready whenever I want.

Happy Heirloom Tomato Season!

Only $2/pound!

Wacky Farmers Market Finds

Happy 4th of July!

Went to the Studio City Farmers Market early this morning and saw some pretty interesting stuff!

Lemon cucumber, which I have been fascinated with ever since we planted a plant of it in our work garden. It's interesting-looking and has kind of almost a spiny thin skin. Excited to try it.

Watermelon pluots, which I had always known as "dinosaur heart" since they are kind of green striped on the outside and pink on the inside.

Donut nectarines, which are pretty self-explanatory.

Yum!

Olive Tapenade

I can't believe this is my first post about olive tapenade. It's one of my favorites that I almost always have in the fridge because it lasts for ages. Maybe mine is not a "real" tapenade because I don't use capers or anchovies, but it is delicious to me. Culinary hero Alton Brown said in his olive tv show that it is important for your tapenade to have different olives with different textures. No problem for me, as I usually have between 5-10 varieties in my fridge at any one time.

The basics, besides olives of course, are fresh lemon juice, dried red chili flakes, fresh parsley, and lots and lots of extra virgin olive oil. Sometimes, if I've tried a variety of olive as an experiment, and I don't like it, I'll use them in tapenade. That works quite well.

No olives out of cans here. In today's batch, I used what I had in the fridge, which consists of 7 olives from 4 countries, including: manzanillla from Spain, kalamata from Greece (which I don't think any tapenade should be made without), four from Italy (Gaeta from Lazio, Barenese from Puglia, Taggiasche from Liguria, Castelvetrano from Sicily), and Old Mission from California.

Oh yeah baby:

I love the way it comes out from the food processor. Before I got one, I used to do it in my little magic bullet, and while it worked and still tasted good, it kind of really pureed it into a paste. The food processor just chops it all, so you're left with little chunks of different kinds of olives. Perfect.

And, the best way to eat it. On a really good piece of toasted bread (this is an organic whole wheat miche from Trader Joe's, which comes as a huge half-loaf that I slice up and freeze to retain freshness. It rocks.). Not toooooooo many things in the world are better.

Frozen Hot Chocolate

On this warm but lovely Memorial Day, I felt like making something new. Not hard, but new. Looked through some recipes I had scanned recently and found this one for Frozen Hot Chocolate in Alice Medrich's Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts So I gave it a whirl. Since I've got the recipe already scanned, I'll upload it, with all rights reserved to the author, of course (click for the larger version):

I halved the recipe and used the espresso powder. This is what it looked like after warming slightly (and I do mean slightly, it was still cool to the touch when all the sugar had defrosted). It took all of 5 minutes. Maybe even less. Oh and I used raw turbinado sugar, because that's what I had. I wonder if it would work out with agave... probably not too well:

Next day, I followed the rest of the recipe. I have no idea if this is what it's really supposed to look like, but it was damn good, so I can't say that I care much!