Desert Fruit

What distinguishes our Tucson home from all the rest in our post-WWII tract-home development are the two stately olive trees that grace our front yard. Our property is the only one in the neighborhood that retains its original curbside olive trees. When our development, and others just like it all over Tucson, were first built, its streets were lined with olive trees.  Over time, the trees died or were chopped down my homeowners who found the trees to be more of a nuisance than a distinctive shade tree.  The city of Tucson has since band the planting of fruit-bearing olive trees anywhere in the city.  Olive trees have a nasty habit of producing tremendous amounts of pollen and dropping huge numbers of olives all over sidewalks and streets. Believe me when I tell you that fallen olives will turn a sidewalk into a slippery purple-black mess. They are so bitter that the birds won't even eat them. People who come to the desert to get relief from their pollen allergies, have little appreciation for olive trees.  Most of the original dwellers in these neighborhoods didn't grow up eating olives, anyway. Most Tucsonans still don't believe the olives these trees produce are no different from the ones sold in grocery stores. 

When Jim first phoned me back in New Jersey to tell me than he had clinched the deal on this remarkable mid-century modern burnt Adobe brick ranch house, he made sure to mention the two olive trees out front.  While I am a big fan of olive oil and olives, I wasn't quite sure what it meant to be lucky enough to be moving to a property that came with its very own olive trees.  Jim suggested I start researching how to cure my own olives.  I had been hoping that our next home would come with fruit trees, but I was visualizing the citrus variety and never olives. 

Shortly after coming to Tucson, while I was getting an oil change on my car, I happened to pick up a copy of Wine Spectator in the waiting area of the repair shop. This was not your typical high-end luxury car dealership waiting area, so I was rather surprised to find that the owner had some back copies of Wine Spectator hanging around. This was a hole-in-the-wall, two-man operation, sporting a working vintage 1970's portable T.V. for the customers' watching pleasure.  Hey, this is Tucson; you just never know.  I started turning pages, and there smack in the first pages of the magazine was an entire story about pairing olives with wines and how you can cure your own olives!  Wow!  I couldn't wait to tell Jim.  I tore the page with the olive curing instructions out of the magazine and stuffed it in my purse.

If you go out on the web for instructions for curing olives or you contact your local Cooperative Extension Hot line, they will give you directions for this big production requiring large plastic buckets and a quantity of lye.  Lye!  That's powerful stuff and I had no intention of messing with it.  I only wanted to experiment with a couple of half pint jars worth of olives.  The easier method espoused in the Wine Spectator simply required burying the olives in a container of basic table salt for several weeks until the olives are completely dried out.  So, with a large box of "canning" salt, I set out to make my first jar of home-cured olives.  The plastic container sat on the kitchen counter for six weeks.  Every few days I would shake it around to keep the salt from caking up with too much moisture.  Half way through the process, I transferred the olives to a fresh batch of salt.  At the end of six weeks, my olives were ready for the final step: Rinse, drain, place in a clean jar and pour olive oil over them, completely covering them and filling the jar.  Add a clove of garlic, red pepper flakes or whatever spices you like and you're done.  That first batch of olives brought me right back to my grandparents' kitchen.  My olives were all black and wrinkled and tasted just like the ones I remember eating as a kid - sans the fresh piece of good Italian bread.  A good loaf of Italian bread is something impossible to fine in Tucson, but that's another post. 

That first fall olive harvest ended up as Christmas presents shipped back to New Jersey for my family.  They were a big hit, and I was now in the home-made olive business.