Curing olives ~ a labor of love

Every year for the last 3 years I have cured olives for our home consumption. The first time I did it though it was helping a friend do her own stash and it was such fun and hers tasted so good a few months down the line that I had to try it myself. I eventually found a local farmer who would sell me 20kgs a year and so began the process.

Fresh raw olives

We can only get black mission olives from our farmer and while I used to always buy Calamata from the store, I have learnt to enjoy Black Mission now.

In the beginning I wonder why I put myself through this as I change the water each day for 2 weeks. It's a bother to drain the water and refill all these jars each day. For this process I only use tap water but later on I switch to spring water for the long wait.

Floating egg

So after 2 weeks of sitting in fresh water, changed everyday I switch them to brine. They sit in brine for up to 3 months which draws out the last bitterness and allows them to develop their flavor.

Figuring out the water to salt ratio is fun the first time but to get it right with each jar it becomes a bit long in the tooth as I end up pouring more and more salt into the water to get the egg to float.The floating egg indicates the right amount of salinity to the water which is the perfect brine ratio.


After about 3 months I rinse an olive or two from each 5 liter jar and taste it. They are very salty at this stage but what I am looking for is no bitter after taste. If they are not at this stage then they stay in the brine for a few more weeks. I taste again more or less every two weeks until they are salty, but bitter free.

Rosemary olives

Now is the fun time! Jar by jar I rinse the olives and put them back into the jars with a 1:3 ratio of wine vinegar/red wine/apple cider vinegar to water. I tried all three this time. Then to each jar I add about 10 cloves of garlic, unpeeled and whole.

I then add something different in the line of herb or spice. This years batches are one each of chilli and fennel seed. Another 2 jars received about 5 sprigs of fresh rosemary and still another 2 recieved handfulls of majoram. Another 2 were left with just garlic. I do not add salt to this last solution as the olives retain enough salt from the brining process.

Lastly I add a generous layer of locally produced olive oil called Olive Pickers. I could buy the cheaper imported stuff, but I like the flavour of this one.

They will now sit in the jars in a cupboard and be eaten over the next year until it is Autum 2013 when the process starts again.

In our home, olives are eaten daily as anytime snacks, used in breads and salads and this year I am very keen to make some tapenades...but we'll see.

Have you tried curing olives?

How do you eat an elephant?

So this is how the joke goes: "How do you eat an elephant?"...."One bite at a time!".

My elephant is my to do list right now and it is longer than my arm. Add to this that it is my busiest season with travelling to homeschool expos as well as our busiest ordering months, my to do list is starting to weigh me down.

Here are some items on it:

Get pine needles for blueberry bush
Plant squash seedlings
Plant cucumber seedlings
Make chicken stock
Make bread
Make laundry liquid
Do school planning 4th term
Pay copyright fees
Sort every single cupboard in my home
Take books to second hand store
Get kids summer clothes sorted
Check olives
Make soap
Do meal plan for next month
Send out toddler ezine
Knit dishclothes
Help son practise making pancakes for kids market
Defrost freezer
Place meat order....


I decided that yesterday afternoon I was going to attack it one bite at a time and keep going until I ran out of time or energy!

Yesterday morning my younger two children took Lucky to a puppy party. Her walking buddies turned a year a few months ago and the dress up party was yesterday, but the afternoon was mine.

The sun was out intermittenly so I decided to start in the garden and the courgettes that are escaping their newspaper pots needed to be planted out. My son had cleaned the bed out last week, but we have these pesky "uiltjies" wild onion type weeds that are a big problem so I had to turn everything over and try to remove as many of the little bulbs as I could before planting the squash into domes.

These squash are golden courgettes or zucchini, the seeds I sent back from the UK when I was there in April. I also have some normal green ones and then I also bought some lovely stripey ones from Living Seeds. We should have a real rainbow selection when the time comes.

I know this may sound strange but I do pray that the Lord will bring the increase in our little garden as we sow the seed.


Thereafter the cucumbers were next to go in...last year cucumbers were a dismal failure, we have about 3. The year before we had so many I even tried making cucumber soup....we still vote that meal as the low point in my cooking career! I have planted about 20 plants along the wall to clumb up the trellises Superman made a couple of years ago.

 Minnie, the matriach of the flock and about 3yrs old now, always comes to see what I am up too. I throw her weeds, worms and snails (if any) whenever she comes to say hello. Today while walking in the forest my little guy who looks after the 10 girls realised that chickens don't live long and had a little check with me on her age. She is healthy and strong and still lays an egg once a week or so, so we all hope she will be with us for a while yet!

While outside I also had to tie the blackberry bramble back to the fence. It really was not planted in the right spot 4 years ago, but it is so well established that I just take the new shoots and tie them to the fence. It grows vigourously during the summer and we have enjoyed it's yield in the last 2 years so I am loathe to move it.


It was then time to turn my attention indoors as the day turned really chilly, so it was to the kitchen I headed. I set the calendula blossoms to infuse in the rice bran oil and then made 10liters of laundry liquid. I use Down to Earth's recipe and since starting it about 2 months ago I am quite happy with it. I ran our last week and have been using the soap nuts in the meantime. I find they work better if I start off the saponification process in hot water before adding them to the cold wash in my machine.

I then got the chicken carcasses saved from the last two weeks meals from the freezer and set them to stock making. This will do us for some soups this week. Oh, by the way, if we don't have soup and I need to use up my stock I have now started using it to cook our brown rice in. It is so yummy if you add a cinamon stick or some cloves to the stock and then the rice....

My father in law has been with us for 8 days now and is missing bread at meals so I set on a 50% rye "sourdough" bread for lunch today. It rises slowly overnight so that I can cook it for lunch...it's in the oven as I write and is filling the air with wonderful smells. You can find the recipe here.

I will serve it with left over soup and curry for the men but I will eat it with avo and lemon curd....!

Then I turned my full attention to the soap making process. I started making soap 4 years ago also using Rhonda Jean's basic soap recipe. I have stuck to that one mainly but every now and again as the seasons allow I like to try others. We loved the lavender soap that was made a couple of months back from lavender collected at my daughter's art teacher. This time it was my own garden that yielded the Calendula blossons. I will make the Sage and Lemon Grass soap next weekend.

It was then time to start supper and a curry was on the cards...so nice for the cold evening...what happened to the hot spring days earlier in the week?

My last job I had time for was checking over the 10kgs of olives that I starting curing back in June. I was concerned as I could see mould growing on the top of some bottles. It was a little saddening to have to throw away about 1kg of them but I tasted a few of the unspoilt ones as I made new brine solutions and they are doing well. They should be ready to put into herbs and oil in a month or two and then be jarred for family gifts in December.

The dent has been made in the to do list, the bites have been taken of the elephant....today I rest!

When life goes hard...

Life is hard going at the moment. We are facing some challenges, schooling problems, the possibilty of saying goodbye to a dear friend, a very sick daughter, but the one that I had today was Big White Dog had to have an operation. Last Friday it was confirmed that he had 3 cancerous growths and they had to be removed today. Poor boy...now we wait for the results of the tests to see if he needs another.

In this tough time I am so grateful for little things. The blessings of my family working together, the rain, the winter garden giving us food, the warmth of the fire at night.

Here are some pictures of the last while...

From Jane's Delicious Kitchen a quick nutritious Asian greens soup with homemade chicken stock and egg noodles.

The first of two slouch berets finished sitting in front of the warm fire...such a nice quick knit. This time I used some lovely handspun/dyed wool from Journey Stitches.

Trying to get my family to eat more beans and this was a win. Delicious bacon and beans in an Italian tomato herby sauce with fresh parmesan on the top. So delicious.

The kids and I built a support structure for our first planting of broad beans using old canes. My engineering skills are not the best but this should do the trick.

It's olive curing season and we are doing our 4th annual curing of 20kgs of olives. I have to change the water in the bottles every evening for a few weeks before brining them. We have one bottle left from last years curing.

Chard, mustard greens and bok choi find their ways into meals everyday. So nice to go into the garden for produce.

On Friday night I watched a lovely video called "Life at Bethany Farm" about a family living and loving in Langkloof. I saw this poem on the wall in the video and recalled it from when my children were young. I thought that it would be great to share here as I too need the reminder when things are going tough that the home is all about love and the people in it.

Love in the Home

If I live in a house of spotless beauty with everything in its place, but have not love, I am a housekeeper--not a homemaker.

If I have time for waxing, polishing, and decorative achievements, but have not love, my children learn cleanliness--not godliness.

Love leaves the dust in search of a child's laugh.

Love smiles at the tiny fingerprints on a newly cleaned window.

Love wipes away the tears before it wipes up the spilled milk.

Love picks up the child before it picks up the toys.

Love is present through the trials.

Love reprimands, reproves, and is responsive.

Love crawls with the baby, walks with the toddler, runs with the child, then stands aside to let the youth walk into adulthood.

Love is the key that opens salvation's message to a child's heart.

Before I became a mother I took glory in my house of perfection.

Now I glory in God's perfection of my child. As a mother, there is much I must teach my child, but the greatest of all is love.

~Author Unknown~

A new home for our olive tree

Way back in 2008 when we started on this adventure, one of the first things I did was plant a Black Mission Olive in a barrel. It has lived there quite happily for these 2.5 yrs. But it was beginning to get pot bound and needed a new home.

I have been looking for a space to plant it, but had not come up with a spot...the only place that has normal garden plants left is a narrow strip along the house under the bedroom windows. It's silly but I was sort of holding onto this patch...not sure why, but eventually my brain clicked over and we cleared it out.

The hole that was dug was double the width and depth of the barrel that the tree has been in. We then filled it 1/2 way up with fresh homemade compost - this soil is really nutrient deficient and the typical "Cape Flats" oily sand. We filled the hole twice with water and let it drain away.

Yesterday, the tree was moved from the barrel, unfortunetly a lot of the roots were broken, but it seems we got the bulk of them. Besides for the blustery wind that we are experiencing, making it quite difficult for the tree, it seems to have settled.

We even have a few olives on it! (they were there before the move!)

Whilst holding my breath....

Well, not actually...but in my head I was...

We tested our olives yesterday and they are ready!



This is the timeline in the life of the olives.

We recieved them in May. They spent 3 months in brine.

We tested them for bitterness a month ago. They were 90% of the way there so we transfered them to the oil, herb and water solution.

Yesterday we finally decided they were good enough for our garden salad.



Some bottles seem to be better than others, but the ones we used last night had a wonderful garlic and rosemary flavour. We put the ones that needed more time to the back and started with the perfect ones.

We have 13kg's of olives to work through now before next autumn. I think I am going to experiment with a few recipes:

Olive ciabatta
Olive tapenade
Olive tart

And of course we eat them for snacks and in salads. Anyone else got some recipes to recommend?

Curing olives

In years past I have cured my own olives. The first time with a friend which was a great social event as we stood with the kids and slit each olive and put them in brine.

This process was then a 6 week long changing of water each day until the bitterness left the raw olive. Thereafter you place them in a vinegar, oil and water mixture with herbs and garlic.

However, when my gorgeous olives arrived yesterday I looked at all 20kg's and thought "No way, there has to be an easier method!" I found this lovely method to try this year which seems much easier. So after getting rid of 8kgs to friends....



I had a packet of Kosher salt in my cupbaoad thankfully which I thought would be enough but I ended up using my sea salt too while trying to get the right salinity.



The recipe calls for one quart of water - here was my first problem...my life is measured in liters! So I filled a quart ziploc bag which I had with water and went to work this way...not very accurate I know and I am sure the more math inclined could have worked out the millilitres for me, however....:-) So then the girls and I decided to give the "egg floating test" a go.



The recipe says that the right amount of salinity is achieved when the egg floats showing a diameter of 2.5cm above the water. After 9 heaped spoons of salt to 1 quart of water it floated!



Then it was simple a matter of filling the jars with olives and placing a weight on them to keep them immersed and then putting on the lids. So there you have it 12kg's of olives in brine for 3 months...

Two exciting things today...

Our raw olives have arrived from Paarl. I had hoped for Calamata but these are Black Mission which are almost as good. In the raw state they are much cheaper, but I can also make sure that only the purest ingredients are used to cure them.

I will post tomorrow on how we are curing them this year as I am going to try a different recipe this time around. I ordered 20kg's, but only used 12kg's and them roped some friends in at 2kg's a time to give it a try.



Then the second exciting thing is that I asked on Freecycle Cape Town if anyone had any wool for me and someone did! This also came today...what a wonderful stash of colors to make into squares for our project this year. Thank you, Mignon!



We are 20 squares into our goal with 80 left to go. I now knit when I wait at sports, in front of the TV, when my children read to me actually anytime I can.