Preserving The Goodness

What do you think is in the buckets?  Any ideas?  There is rather a lot of them.  Olives!

Do you remember a while back when I wrote about the 85 olives I harvested from our tiny little olive tree?  Well, I have a friend called Cori who laughed her head off about my 181 gram pile of olives, cheeky thing.  Anyway last week Cori kindly asked if Steve and I would like to visit her and Adrian's little farm and pick some olives that remained on their trees.  So we had a lovely time visiting them and admiring their fabulous orchard and olive grove.  A wonderful hour was spent on a balmy afternoon in the olive grove picking fat luscious olives, I tell you, I felt like breaking into Italian song!

Henry the Miniature Schnauzer was a perfect gentleman and was very nice to our Pepper the Miniature Schnauzer, he just sighed and lay on the floor when Pepper climbed into his comfy bed, decided it was much nicer than her bed.  And we are very spoilt, we came home with 4 buckets chockablock full of olives, plus a huge bag of lemons, limes and apples.  Thanks Cori and Adrian, we had a great time visiting you! :-)

On the way home from Balingup we bought 25 kg of butchers salt and the following day prepared  a couple of buckets full of brine, a glass of wine each, a chopping board and a knife each, and spent a couple of hours cutting a slash into each olive and tossing them into brine, where they will sit for a couple of weeks, with the brine being refreshed regularly.  There are two buckets of kalamata olives and two buckets of manzanillo olives. 

 

We have scoffed most of the apples, Fuji apples straight off the tree are a wondrous thing.  I have always wanted to make preserved lemons, I saw an episode of Food Safari on SBS once about Moroccan cooking and they use preserved lemons.  Basically you slit the lemons and pack them with salt and squish them into a big jar, adding lemon juice as you go so the lemons are submerged.  

Looks rather pretty don't you think.  I tried doing these some years ago but they went mouldy.  Hopefully this lot will be okay, I sterilised everything I used to prepare them so crossing fingers.  As to what I am actually going to do with them, well, I think some Googling is in order for ideas.

 

We bought a bag of beetroot from a roadside stall last week and I had a go at making a beetroot dip.  Oh my god it was YUMMY!  Beetroot, sour cream, salt and lemon juice all whizzed up together.

And now for your obligatory kanga photo.  They are getting closer and closer to the shed with their grazing, I took this shot through the shed window, this is one of the young lads who was turfed out of the pouch a few months ago.  On the count of three...... awwwwww, he's so cute!