The Olive Harvest: I'm Mediterranean For a Day

The California Institute of Technology, a.k.a. Caltech, has a lovely canopy of mature olive trees shading a central corridor of its tony, ivied campus. But only in the last few years have they made an effort to collect the olives that create a monounsaturated mess every autumn. Nowadays the school, which is better known for its affiliation with NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratories than for olive production, holds an annual harvest that is open both to students and staff and to the outside as well. Since I'd never picked olives before, I figured it was high time I gave it a try.

 These are mission olives, which Franciscan monks from Spain planted at the missions they established up and down the Pacific coastline in the late 1700s.

The first thing I learned is that, despite their diminutive size, olives hurt like the dickens when they pop off the tree and hit you on the head, cheekbone or some other prominent part of your body!

 

Teams of volunteers tackled each tree, with one person climbing the ladder to comb the olives off the branches with what essentially looked like a leaf rake, while the others remained below to collect the fallen fruit. Check out these amazing ladders, with a single support post and rungs that taper from an extra wide stance to quite narrow at the top. (By the way, note the cannon in the background--it appears to be aimed squarely in the direction of Pasadena Community College, just a couple of blocks away. Coincidence...?)

 Most of the olives raked from the trees landed on the burlap tarps, but quite a few bounced off our heads and either landed in the grass or skipped across the pavement. A number of volunteers brought their small children with them, little sprouts who chased the errant olives and flung them happily into the tarps and waiting buckets. It was a real Tom Sawyer kind of day--we had so much fun we kind of forgot we were working. Of course, I'm sure we'd view it quite differently if this was our job in and day out.

 At noon we recessed to enjoy a lavish buffet of olive-based Mediterranean fare, including moussaka, hummus, tabbouleh, tapenade, gyros and kalamata bread. There were also large pans of assorted olives (I was wishing I'd brought a zipper bag with me!), an array of olive oils to sample and escargot cooked up on the spot and served to us on rounds of baguette. I should have photographed the layers as I piled them onto my plate. I wanted a taste of everything, and I got it! For the most part it was incredibly healthy stuff, and it was all quite good.
 

 Lunchtime brought a little messy recreation as students with hands coated in olive oil engaged in a tug-o-war in the center of the sun-dappled grove. A woman bearing a large tin of olive oil gave each student's hands a liberal glug-glug-glug before the tugging commenced. The winning team (pictured) chanted "meat truck! meat truck! meat truck!" in between battles. Nothing against my vegetable-loving brethren, but I'm not surprised by who won. My guess is the victors got to pick which food truck was going to be visiting campus. The carnivores carried the day.

The event featured an olive-pressing demonstration, a job that seems pretty low-tech, considering that it was taking place on a campus where students train to work in space exploration, among other extraordinary engineering pursuits. This is a more modern version of the ancient screw press, not as quaint as the giant stone wheels you still find doing the job throughout the Mediterranean. It takes about 11 pounds of olives to yield a liter of oil, so rather than pressing all the olives this way, our harvest will be shipped to Santa Barbara for oil production. As for learning the technique of brining olives, our brining expert was sick that day, so this lesson will have to wait for next year's harvest.

Two down--a gazillion to go!

 It was instructive learning through hands-on experience what autumn brings for those who live amongst the olive groves that cover the Mediterranean. Olive harvesting combines long hours of what is essentially tedious labor with a great social opportunity. When you pitch in with a group to do this job, you find that you have a lot of time to talk as you work. And you come to understand how a collective effort like this can be so central to the life of a community.

Caltech's students may be preparing themselves for the most high-tech jobs on this planet and possibly a few others, but I appreciate their cheerful embrace of one of the oldest and humblest chores on Earth.

To hear the story behind how Caltech students spearheaded this effort a few years ago, check it out on NPR. If you're interested in keeping up with the project--and participating next year--visit Caltech's olive harvest website for more information.

Week #39 Moroccan

One of the many reasons I would love to visit Morocco is to venture into a souq and see first hand the mountains of spices, to smell their heady aromas and luxuriate in the exotic atmosphere that my-oh-my certainly does look appealing on all those travel shows. It's just a step across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain, so trekking to Morocco would certainly be doable next time Himself and I hightail it to the Continent.

For a preview of what we might expect to find on the table, our friends Pat and Aaron invited us to dinner at Sassi in Encino for a meal that was not only Moroccan but kosher as well. As is our custom, we ordered several items and ate family style. Their young daughter, Gabriella was game for it the adventure, a real trooper. No kid chow for THIS intrepid gal! That made the evening even better--who knew eight-year-olds like mushrooms?!

Morocco may be in North Africa, but its cuisine contains a hefty blend of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern influences. If you know those cuisines, there will be a familiarity as you delve into your meal, just with a heavy dose of spices.

We started with a platter of fried kuba, little semolina footballs filled with ground beef; pastels, triangular filo pockets filled with potato; falafel, fried balls of ground garbanzo beans; and Moroccan cigars, which I'd liken to a filo "stogie" filled with ground beef. And a dish of hummus to dredge them all through. You really have to approach these babies with caution, because they're so dense and filling you could easily stuff yourself before the entrées arrive. And they're so good that it's difficult to stop with just one of each. Why does fried food have to be so ridiculously satisfying?

The myriad little dishes of salads on the table reminded me of our Israeli meal. We had carrot salad and red and green cabbage salads. The fresh crispness of the salads with their lemony essence helped balance those heavy fried goodies we'd just gobbled up. The flat bread, khobz, is thicker and more substantial than other pita-type bread I've had before. It was a good all-purpose tool for dipping, dredging and sandwich building.

We also got an Israeli salad of cucumbers and tomatoes and an entire bowl of olives. These Moroccan olives are cooked in a peppery red sauce and served warm, which cuts their brininess and enhances their flavor. Oh yes, that's a whole baked chicken in the background, a tasty little guy smothered in mushrooms and love.

Variety was the order of the evening, as we opted to have some fish and lamb to go with our roasted chicken and all the rest (I wonder how you say "fixins" in Moroccan?). The super-fresh salmon is cooked in a spicy, garlicky tomato sauce. I could have forgone the rest of the meal to mop up all that pleasantly warm and happy sauce with the khobz.

The roasted lamb was served with a rice and lentil combo called majadra, making it a sort of North African pilaf. You'll have to forgive me, but at this point my full tum and empty brain conspired to make me forget exactly how this lamb tasted--besides good. I plan to return just for the lamb. Oh yeah, and all the rest as well...

A day or two later, once I'd emerged from the food coma, I was inspired to dust off the tagine Himself had given me for Christmas, and to use those lovely brined lemons that came with it. I made a chicken and olive tagine and served it with couscous, a semolina-based alternative to rice. Just as the first order of business with Cajun and Creole cooking is to make a roux, with Moroccan you start by making ras el hanout, a mélange of spices that can be as varied as the tastes and personalities of those who prepare it. However, it is usually some combination of spices including cinnamon, cardamom, clove, coriander, black pepper, cumin and turmeric. With the spices, olives, onions and brined lemons, not to mention the sweet currants and rich pine nuts in the couscous, this plate of food had an awful lot going for it. It came nearer than any dish I've ever had to satisfying the Thai requirement for sweet, salty, sour, bitter and hot in a single dish. Sublime!

One of the secret weapons of Moroccan cooking is brined lemon, which is pure salty, pickled magic. It's made by slitting and stuffing fresh lemons with salt and stashing them in a jar of brine and lemon juice for a few months, which makes them self-pickling. Do this and you elevate those lemons to new heights of culinary usefulness. What the process does is to intensify the lemon quality--not the tartness, as you might expect, but the sheer lemony flavor. It ferments, sort of like kimchi, so a richness develops that makes them a great flavoring agent. If you don't want all that salt, just wash it off.

To accompany the tagine I made a Moroccan orange salad, one of the easiest and yummiest things you can make, and great anytime, regardless of the menu. The genius of this salad is that it's quick, healthy and versatile.

Moroccan Orange Salad

Peel and segment two oranges and place them in a bowl. Remove the pits from four dates, cut them into eighths long ways and add them to the bowl. If you'd like, toss in a few oil-cured olives. Sprinkle over some ras-el hanout, about a half teaspoon, or if you don't have any, use an assortment of any spices that makes you happy--cinnamon, clove, nutmeg and/or my personal favorite, cardamom. Drizzle on a bit of good olive oil and toss. Top it with some chopped fresh mint. That's all there is to it. If you have a few minutes, let it sit on the counter so the flavors have time to cozy up to each other.

This will serve two people, and the recipe is easy to expand to feed more. I find that once I've had this salad with a meal, I don't go looking for dessert.