The suddenly large and hulking Bonzo (how did he get so tall?) is home for the summer after completing his sophomore year at the U of I.
I was looking through the fridge for my jar of kalamata olives. Real ones. Imported ones.
Expensive ones.
I usually eat green olives, but I like a black olive “hit” every so often. To me, they’re a special treat, partly because of their richness (I have Crohn’s and have to watch the fat intake or else suffer repercussions), but also because of their comparative expense.
And they weren’t there. Blankly, I thought I was having a Senior Moment. Until Bonzo came in the kitchen while I was making a stopgap green olive sandwich.
“I thought I had a jar of kalamata olives in there, but I couldn’t find it, so I must have eaten them,” I remarked idly.
“No, I ate them,” he said cheerfully.
“…a whole jar?!”
“Yeah, well, you ‘indoctrinated’ me into ‘real’ black olives at Christmas”–which was true, I had made a point of demonstrating to him at an opportune moment what a “real” black olive tastes like–“and I realized they were good, so I ate them. Wednesday night.”
“The whole jar?!”
“Yeah. They were good.” He smacked his lips.
I was thinking from the thread title that he was a little kid. When I was a little kid I’d get waiters to bring me lemon slices and pickles to eat. I used to love wolfing down lemons!
Those things, particularly the unpitted ones, are sometimes so good that you just can’t stop.
I once ate seventy - count them - 70 - kalamata olives before the meal. I know I ate seventy of them because my girlfriend counted the pits. It was at Fernando’s in Macau. (I then ate a load of olive oil fries and half a chicken). My trip to the bathroom the next day was… interesting.
Heh. I love green olvies, but always found those black olives that my family eats to be nasty nasty nasty. Dining at O’Charley’s recently, they have a new Greek Salad thing with Calamata olives in it – they were DELISH. I didn’t really think they were “black olives” since they were more of a light brown. I ended up buying a (very expensive) bottle of Calamata olives…yum, yum, yum. I just wish they were pitted…I am lazy and prefer to just pop them in my mouth without having to chew around a pit.
Yeah, they’re nasty. That’s because what they really are is a regular green olive, i.e. a “not-ripe” olive, that has been treated with lye in order to turn it black. So what you get is an olive that’s almost but not quite entirely unlike an olive.
I have no idea how the California “ripe” olive industry gets away with billing their product as “ripe” olives, because they’re not.
Plus they have an annoyingly chirpy website that has one of the most diabolically bad so-called “games” for kids I have ever seen. There appears to be no point to it other than cram-it-down-yer-throat-education. You click on the healthy items–nothing happens to the round white dude. You click on the non-food items, like “stewed tennis balls”–the round white dude turns green. You click on the junk food–a talking olive pops up and lectures you on trans-fats, plus the round white dude gets fat and cross-looking. I was curious to see just how fat the round white dude could get, but apparently he does not explode, which was a disappointment.
Offspring goes into what we call Flavor Immersion Episodes or FIE where he will eat one and decide more is better. One time I introduced him to kiwi fruit. Next thing I know all 6 are gone. You should’a seen his diaper the next day!
This goes for tangerines, jars of pickled okra, pimentos, bags of oranges or anything else that he finds he likes. Been that way for 16 years and he is a big one - just topped 6’3’’. He’s never found anything he liked he couldn’t finish a container of. Now you see why I hide or disguise anything I want another portion of someday.
When I got married, as I was the oldest of a large family, as well as the oldest of about 50 cousins, we had a reception that was more like a family picnic than a “real” wedding reception. My husband was from Europe, and nobody from his family came for the wedding because they were convinced he was playing a trick on them.
My mother was very fond of kalamata olives, and they were definitely expensive, a rare treat-- as in I doubt if she had them more than 3 times in all the time I knew her. So we had a few jars of olives to put on the refreshments table.
A bunch of my boy cousins (around 10 years old) decided that it would be fun to feed my 20-month old baby brother a whole jar of olives (they told us they had pitted them by biting into them and removing the pits!). They had him drink champagne to top it off.
When my mother thought of looking for the baby in the bunch of people around, he was drunk. His puke was a sight to behold on my mother’s pale aqua dress.
I just bought three kinds of olives this weekend, at this place:
I had Alphonso, which are large and purplish, with a vinegary tang. I also had green olives stuffed with garlic. The third kind was small and black, called Black Cerignolas. These had a mild, almost sweet flavor.
I had to restrain myself from buying a dozen more kinds.
