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Overloading the Machine
Marinated Olives
From The Boston Globe Magazine, 2004 December 5
Makes 4 cups
Use a good mix of olives to get varied shapes and colors. We combine, among others, black Greek kalamata; cerignola, which are huge and bright green; and picholine, small green French olives.
- 4 cups mixed olives
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- Pared rind of 1/2 orange
- 2 bay leaves
- 1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1/2 bunch fresh thyme, leaves removed from stems
- 1 small hot chili pepper, cut into rings and seeded
Set a colander in the sink and tip the olives into it. Rinse them with cold water. Transfer to a bowl.
Add the oil and stir well. Cut the orange rind into the thinnest possible strips and add them to the olives along with the bay leaves, cumin, thyme, and chili pepper. Toss gently but thoroughly.
Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate the olives for 1 week, turning them occasionally. Transfer to small dishes, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and refrigerate until giving as gifts.
Notes: Haven't tried it yet. I love olives, and there are other people in my family who would like these as a gift. Problem is, keeping them refrigerated.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a
creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely
a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the
bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.
Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact
that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth
to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the
very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more
afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by
an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam
as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea--and
put him at the head of the procession.
-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
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