   Olives
  OK- here I go.I love Olives. I use them in all kinds of recipes, and I eat them dry. But chopped they are also very good.Especially the big black olives are my favorite. I use them op Pizza, pasta's , and just dry.Anyone has a good recipe or an idea what I can do with olives?   
  I never heard of dried olives...I think I like them best as a snack. Black olives are good, green stuffed with pimento are my current favourite.Then there are the red olives which I always think taste like pepperoni... is it just me?Has anyone ever had fresh olives from the tree/bush? Do they taste much different from buying them in a jar?   ;  Afaik, fresh olives from the tree taste bad, bitter. They need to bathe for a time in salt and water.   ;  Freshly picked olives are extremely bitter. You do not want to eat them. The best way to get them "fresh" is in the brine or whatever other salt-curing mechanism was used to originally cure them. Not in the jar, not in the tub of marinades or oils they're sitting in in even the "better" supermarkets, et cetera. This isn't to say that those venues are neccessarily bad (I love a good sampling from the olive bar as much as the next guy, and let's be realistic -- it's hard to find olives sold otherwise in the US), but they alter the taste and texture of the olive dramatically. It's really hard to find them freshly imported in the US, at least on the east coast. You generally need to go to fancy delis and, of course, pay a bit more -- but if you like olives, it's worth trying at least once. It's a surprisingly different experience from the jarred, tinned or "tubbed" olives we usually have around here.Supposedly there are some places where you can purchase uncured, fresh olives in season. I have yet to run across one of these stores, but I'd love to at least once so I could home-cure some olives. The only time I've ever seen them was when my (now dead) great aunt had some a few years ago. Yes, my only regret concerning my great aunt is that I didn't ask her where she got those damned olives. We weren't very close.The fully ripe (black) varieties are not among my favoriates, I generally like the smaller, green ones (typically unpitted). I generally pit and slice up the larger ones for olive salads or spreads, or as part of fillings for various things.   ;  I hated olives as a kid.  My dad always had pimiento-stuffed olives with his dinner, I couldn't even stand the smell of them.Eventually I realized I didn't mind black olives on a pizza, then I discovered how crazy delicious Kalamata olives are.  Still didn't like green olives, but eventually I came around to enlightenment, and now there are pretty much no olives I don't like.I've come full circle, and just two weekends ago I made my very first Muffuletta:Mmm, muffulettaThat was the best sandwich ever.  It was so good that I'm making another one tonight because the recipe made so much olive salad.   ;  Olives are the devil's jalapeños.  Bitter instead of spicy.  Blehg.My usual encounter with them is on salads and in the form of olive oil.   ;  Mmmm Olives. After reading this thread, I decided I had to taste some olives (which I hadn't tasted in a long time) and immediately walked to the store and bought a jar. Pimiento-stuffed green olives and some bread is what I'm having now.That is all.   ;  Olive oil - i use it in almost every recipe. I dip bread in it, and I put in in vinaigrettes. On pizzas they are great. However, im not so sure of raw olives, which i've never tried.   ;  Yummy topic!A salad without green and maybe black olives is inacceptable for me. Black olives on pasta & pizza are nice, I also used a mixture of dried tomatos + black olives + garlic + oregano + extra native cold-extracted oliveoil --> blender to make a delicious pesto. Which is good on pasta, breads, I've even put it on boiled potatoes and smashing/mixing them and the pesto with a fork.I love olives so much that I will make the effort to devide the other ingredients of a salad into two halfs in two different bowls, and just mine gets olives, because my gf hates olives :-DBlack olive paste that I bought at a turkish grocery shop was also quite nice, spread on bread or mashed with potatoes...I once saw a guy on eBay (yes ebay :D ), he was from Greece, selling fresh olives, he would ship to anywhere in Europe. Have lost his name, though.   