Locavores take note! Wallingford neighbor Rina Nicholson announces this year’s homemade Middle-Eastern-style olive sale just in time for your holiday shopping. While the olives themselves are shipped up (fresh) from California, the curing happens right here in Wallingford. Some ingredients, such as garlic and chile peppers used to cure the olives, are grown in Rina’s Wallingford yard. Grape leaves are come from a neighbor’s garden as well.
Details of the sale:
- Who: Hannah’s Olives by Rina Nicholson
- What: Home Cured Olives sale + authentic homemade Middle Eastern foods like Pomegranate Vinegar, stuffed grape leaves (not Greek style), Yemenite hot paste, unique jams, some plants. Free vegetable seeds and tasting samples will also be available.
- Where: 4033 Eastern Avenue North, 98103
- When: December 3rd & 4th, 10 am-5 pm
- Cost: Price of products varies. Last year’s 16 oz jar of green olives went for about $10. All proceeds of the sale will benefit Women For Women, which helps women war survivors rebuild their lives.
And the awesome backstory: As a kid, Rina used to make olives with her mom in Jerusalem. As it happens, a friend and her family from Kurdistan ran a restaurant in Israel and they taught Rina how to grow olives and cure olives ‘properly,’ based on generations of experience. They helped her learn to get the sun/salt/water ratio right. Too much water and the olives are soft and too salty. Too little water, and they are too hard and salty.
Here in Seattle, Rina doesn’t find the authentic Israeli olive flavors she loves. So she cures them herself.
The process of curing olives is pretty labor-intensive. First, Rina breaks the olives gently one by one, with a rock, to break the skin a bit. She places the olives in fresh water and changes that water daily for five days to decrease bitterness. Then she prepares salt water with lemon, homegrown garlic, black pepper, and hot peppers (mostly from her garden). She adds the water to the olives and covers them in a closed container, adding grape leaves to keep the oxygen and olives separate. Finally, she adds some olive oil on top and leaves the whole batch alone for a few weeks.
Each olive tastes different, based on its placement in the jar — near garlic or peppers or other ingredients. As Rina says, “Each olive is a different story, depending on where it sits in the jar.” Rina improved the process a bit since last year to let fermentation happen before the jars are canned. There are no artificial additives.
Rina named her olives, “Hannah’s Olives” after the friend’s mother who passed away. A lovely tribute.
Sounds like win-win-win to me.
Stop by Rina’s sale Dec 3 or 4th, or contact her directly at zeitunim at gmail dot com. (Zeit” is “olive” in Hebrew, and “unim” means “small olives.” )