Olive you glad I didn't say banana?

You know, like the joke, Orange you glad I didn't say banana? No, is that just me? Well, okay,  let's move on. Because this post is all about olives. It's hard core olive season around here. Trees are swelling with olives ready to be picked, from farms to random trees all over town. And in the shuk you can buy raw olives for pennies.

But why buy what you can pick yourself, right? Well, not us, but for Aviva and her friend Chaya, yes. They spent a couple days helping out a family with a number of olive trees preparing them for pressing to oil, and were rewarded with a whole bunch for them to take home and prepare themselves.

And home to our house they came. So the two sibling creative chefs formerly of pickle off fame did some research and learned how to cure and prepare raw olives.

But, before any preparation could be done, because these were grown in Israel we needed to take out tithes. Something I was (really) surprisingly excited about. We're in Israel! We get to do a weird cool new mitzvah (seriously, I said that, I don't know what I was on that day).  Anyways, here are all the laws that were followed. 

And onto preparation. They calculated the size of the pan in order to ascertain 10%. Little did Ami know, if he just asked, I could have told him the size, they're standard...but you know, why not break out my sewing kit for curing olives?

Once they were separated Ami and Aviva started the process. I think it involves putting them in jars and changing the water every day for a week. After that, I'm not sure, but will keep you updated!

And here they are jarred and curing. Hopefully. 

On a side note, last night I went out (one perk of Hurricane Sandy is our office being closed so I was able to leave the house past 5pm) and Ami getting Eitan ready for bed time kept the tabs off his diapers for some reason. I'm not sure why. But, the engineer in him found a way around it and came up with this solution. Yes, that's masking tape around my baby's diaper.



So that's what we're up to over here.