Olive harvest


 Harvesting olives - a fitting way to spend Samhain in Sicily. 

My kids had fun for (all of five minutes) shaking the branches with rakes to loosen the hidden olives - camouflaged by the silvery leaves. But they found your neck gets sore staring up through the branches so they soon gave up the rakes and collected and sorted the olives into green and black piles.

We didn't get enough to take to a frantoio - you need about 25kilos to get a decent about of oil, but we can dry them in soil to give them an earthy flavour, or just in the oven, then put them in jars with garlic, chilli, origano and a little oil, if we want to soften them up a bit. The olives were juicy and ripe - and released an amazing aroma of spicey fresh olive oil if split. 

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