I love olives! I have loved them for as far back as I can remember. I don’t know if it started as a party trick for my parents, having young children who ate weird things like chillis and olives. It certainly wasn’t common in small town Australia in the 1970’s.
Sometimes we would go olive picking with Mum and Dad and they would preserve their own olives. I remember a cupboard downstairs which was full of tall jars of green olives.
Olives are a very divisive food – you either love them or hate them and people can become very passionate about which side of the fence they sit on in that debate.
Knowing my passion for olives, I am not sure why, that until recently, I had only made olive tapenade once in my life. I think that when I made it for the first many years ago (pre-vegan) I used anchovies and it did not taste good. It was so bad that I did not feel encouraged to try again.
A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I has dinner at a fantastic new Italian restaurant in our town named Bacaro and we had a delicious anti-pasto platter which included olive tapenade. We loved the whole platter so much that we made our own for lunch a couple of days later.
This time I didn’t worry about a recipe, I just threw a few things in my food processor (including capers instead anchovies) and it was so, so good. Even my non-olive-loving husband liked it. I ate it for a week for lunch with my veggies and a piece of sourdough.
Since I just threw everything in without measuring, I will try to be a bit more precise with my recipe today but just use this as a guide and use your own judgement and taste-buds as you create your own tapenade.
- Jar of pitted Kalamata Olives( 345g /12oz)
- ¼ cup of baby Capers
- 2 tbsp Lemon Juice
- 1 clove Garlic
- 2 tbsp Olive Oil
- 1 tbsp Flat Parsley (finely chopped)
- Pinch Sea Salt
- Drain olives and capers and add to food processor.
- Add rest of ingredients.
- Blitz but remember to only blitz very briefly if you want a more chunky tapenade.
- Taste and if required, add more salt, lemon etc.. to suit your taste-buds.
- Serve.
You can of course make tapenade with all types of olives and you can add other herbs including basil. I don’t always include parsley, I mainly did it today for a bit of extra colour in my photos. Whether you want to use pitted olives is up to you. I am usually very, very anti pitted olives because I just don’t think they taste as good, but for tapenade, I can’t tell the difference and it is a lot of olives to pit and really, I have better things to do – like eating delicious olive tapenade! Enjoy.
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