Freshly Lopped

Spent the morning picking olives to preserve as table olives for our own use. Folk here can't understand how ignorant we are about them, and wish someone would have time to teach us - maybe we'll learn with Zé Carteiro when/if he comes.

But here's the little I have learnt. Bottom left are the wild olives, of which we have many. Every year, you should remove most of these, but some should be left if you might want to renew an ancient tree by a new graft. I think we have two grafted varieties in our 200 or so trees - the larger Galego ones, bottom right, and the smaller Bical ones top left. The Bical ones are the best for eating because they're firmer. The only difference between green ones and black ones are that the black ones are ripe. Most folk here seem to prefer the green ones. They love the really green ones at the beginning of the season that are cut or smashed to hurry up the preserving, and are still quite bitter. The top right ones are ones that have been drilled into by the "olive bug", which I've tried to eliminate as I picked.

So now I begin the preserving - basically covering in water, which you have to change daily if you remember (can't be tap water because the chlorine makes them go soggy, which isn't a problem as we only have borehole water) until the bitterness is dissolved away - ten days or so. And then you put them in salty water or oil, with whatever flavourings you like. We used oregano and orange peel last year, and garlic in some.

A lot of bought olives in other places have been artificially ripened and preserved with chemicals like caustic soda, ferrous gluconate and ferrous lactate, and, according to the Alentejanos, have awful texture and flavour.

Gratefuls:
- standing under an olive tree, hand picking the fruit - our trees are absolutely loaded this year, listening to birds, feeling the sunshine
- being able to eat something healthy, grown and produced without chemicals
- a lovely card from Julia and Tom

The Body, ch 5 - The Head, p85
We all know that you can't live without your head, but for how long exactly is a question that received rather a lot of attention in the late eighteenth century. It was a good time to wonder because the French Revolution gave inquiring minds a steady supply of freshly lopped heads to examine.