The Wonderful Rabbi of Oz - Back to Blogging

Back to Blogging

Posted at 2:11 PM, Thursday, May 15, 2008

I have officially run out of excuses to neglect my blog. Bobby's parents returned to the U.S. on May 5, along with several paintings by Aboriginal artists and two didgeridoos. Two nights ago, I finished the third book of Phillip Pullman's terrific "His Dark Materials" trilogy, although I'm contemplating starting the whole thing over again and reading it a little less breathlessly. And this morning, we survived our first rental inspection in the house where we've lived since October. WAY better than the inspections in our last house, when our property manager used to walk around with her clipboard, frowning and scribbling down notes, and then leave without saying anything to us. Our current landlady was very chatty and told us she would send us a written report for our records. Wish we'd gotten one of those at our last house! We are very happy where we are living now, despite the leaky shower, broken toilet seat, and rusty water. To compensate, we have lemons galore, oranges rapidly ripening on the tree, and enormous amounts of olives.

Personally, I have never liked olives, but I wasn't going to let them go to waste. Nadav and I held a huge tarp taut while Bobby shook down what turned out to be 6 kilos of black olives (about 13 pounds), with plenty of olives still on the trees. I pulled a recipe off the New York Times website, quadrupled it, and packed our olives in a huge bucket along with eight lemons, four heads of garlic, celery, four handfuls of chili peppers, lemon juice, white vinegar, and lots of salt water. Now it's supposed to sit for six months and will hopefully be edible and not moldy when we open it. Thanks are due to the Honey Shoppe at the Central Market, which kindly parted with a 20 liter container that had formerly held organic dishwashing detergent.

I promise to try to get more entries in in the next several weeks. In all honesty, the ideas are not flowing as thick and as fast as they used to, but I'm sure more exciting things will happen to me, and I'll write about them!

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Olives in May?

Posted by Simcha Daniel Burstyn at 9:36 PM, Thursday, May 22, 2008

Down Under. I know, but it's hard to imagine, after all, in Israel Olives are November. Or November is Olives, depending on how you look at it.

Here in Pgh, PA, May is November, we've had a week of temperatures in the 50s. That's 5-10 C.

Anyway, I hope you soaked the olives in fresh water for a week before putting them in the brine, changing the water daily. If not, they'll likely be quite bitter, which won't endear them to your palate.

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