Springtime Olives and Good Neighbors

When we moved to Italy, we never thought that we would have such an incredible privilege to benefit and learn from our new neighbors… But we have received such generosity from everyone we’ve encountered - our feelings of gratitude overwhelms us sometimes...

About a month ago, our neighbor invited me to come to his garden to get a bunch of olives that he said were ripe for the picking. (For our regular readers: he’s the "goat and sheep and chicken guy" whose farmland is directly below our house.)

Although I thought olive harvest time is normally in the fall, I went along, of course - my Long Island sensibilities are obviously happy to trust a 3rd generation contadino! After doing a bit of weeding and clean-up in one little garden section of his property (he has several, deftly wedged between the hillside and the railroad tracks that run under the hill through town), he showed me which trees to harvest. I picked a huge bag of black olives, which was only a small fraction of what was ready for picking.

Matt’s olive harvest haul

After soliciting and receiving much advice on how to deal with the olives (other than simply eating them raw, as our neighbor suggested), we settled on a method to peel them and use them to stew some beef. But I decided to set aside a jar of them as an experiment, sealing them with some salt to extract a good deal of the bitter liquid component of the fruit.

A few of our salt-cured olives; the green in the background is our neighbor’s groves, below our balcony!

A month later, we have a hefty jar of black olives, cured and delicious. Paired with some nice pecorino, it makes for a perfect apertivo snack.

Grazie, caro vicino!