This ain't no Garden of Eden

[jinman]

Bird, I'm sure it was the banana peppers that made it taste so good.

 

[rox]

Jinman,
I totally understand where you are coming from putting in a lot of effort to get the garden close by the house. Sometimes you jsut want to take your coffee and walk through and just enjoy it and when it is far away from the house you miss those quiet moments.
I know I am a couple pages back from the original post but wanted to let you know that your zuccini flowers are valuable. If you contact any upscale restaurant they will buy them from you. Also you can freeze them. Just pick them when they are nice and big and put them in a zip lock bag and freeze them. You jsut make a simple flour and water mixture, about the thickness of pancake mix, and fry them in olive oil. Yum yum.
Here is another really good recipe you might enjoy with all your veggies.
Take Pita Bread, take the tip of a serrated knife, poke the knife into the pita bread about 3/4 of an inch and go all the way around the circle of the bread. Now you can easily seperate the pita bread into two "tortias" for lack of a better word. Place these down with the smooth side up on a flat pan like a cookie sheet.
Slice your peppers paper thin and place on the Pita bread, add very thin slices onions, add some crumbles of Fetta cheese, oyu don't need that much Fetta. Add some black Greek Olives, and with your thumb over the opening of your bottle of olive oil quickly circle the Pita and add a few drops of olive oil. You don't need that much oil, jsut a little. Now get some black Tapenade you need only about a level teaspoon don't add to much. Smear black tapenade on top of everything. Bake in a hot oven of around 400 degrees for oh maybe 15 minutes or so. Just keep looking at it and you will know when it is done. Put it on a cutting board and using a pizza cutter cut into quarters and serve hot. It is a very good recipe for green and red peppers and you can use yellow ones also. I have not had bananna peppers in a long time but I am just guessing here it would not turn out that great with bananna peppers. It is a good recipe to make when you ahve a lot of really fresh great tasing peppers.
You might have a challenge finding tapenade it would be sold in a food specialty (read- fancy) store. Your tapenade once opened will last a couple months in the refridgerator but the jars are very little so chances are you will use it up way before it would ever go bad. Having the tapenade on top really makes a difference in the recipe so it is worth the effort to try and find it if you can.

We hand pick our olives for our tapenade and in the spring next year we will be exporting it to the states. I got a chemist to do the nutrition label for me so I am all set to go. In a few weeks we will pick our Salonenque olives for the green tapenade and in December we will pick Bouteillan olives for our black tapenade. Olives are just like banannas in that all banannas start out green then go to yellow and eventually all turn black. Olives are the same way. All olives start out green then they all turn black. The difference int he green and black tapenade is when you pick the olives. Then we take them to a mill that specializes in curing them and then we haul them to a food processor to be made, using our recipe, into our tapenade.

 

[jinman]

Rox, you are going to laugh, but I found a nice tapenade at Sam's Club. Is that "upscale enough for you? I loved it and my wife hated it. Go figure. . . . Frankly, I have many more tastes for the exotic than she does. I will see if I can find more tapenade and I will try your recipe for sure. Thanks! Be sure and tell us when you get your tapenade ready to ship. I've never had anything from you that I didn't love. I keep and use your olive oil often. I don't use it for frying, but anytime I need really delicate flavor, it's my choice.

 

[rox]

In the recipe above I forgot, add very thin sliced tomatoes as well, not to much though.
Jinman I am IMPRESSED, you like tapenade. Tapenade is like that you love it or you hate it.

 

[Bird]

I'd never heard of tapenade until this thread, but after looking it up on google and looking at a couple of recipes for making your own, I think it's a safe bet that I'd like and my wife wouldn't touch it.

 

[jinman]

In the recipe above I forgot, add very thin sliced tomatoes as well, not to much though.
Jinman I am IMPRESSED, you like tapenade. Tapenade is like that you love it or you hate it.

Rox, I will say that this tapenade I had did not have anchovies in it. If it did, I don't think I realized it. Anyway, many recipes I've found say that anchovies are optional. I've never developed a taste for them. It's something about being salty and having a strong fish taste. I'm not a fan of caviar either. However, when Vin and Mary Dowd were here from Australia, I tried some vegemite and found it salty, but very good. I don't think it's the salty taste that is turning me off with anchovies or caviar.

 

[rox]

Here is a secret. If your olives don't naturally have a good flavor to them or if they are kind of rotten olives that are making up the main ingredient then the producer adds a lot of anchovies to cover over the taste. With good tapenade you barely taste the anchovies and in fact you would not know they were in there if you didn't look at the ingredients, it is not at all a strong detectable anchoivy taste.
I was never a fan of anchovies either but my brother in law prepares them from fresh anchovie fish and those are awesome. Just like me you probably never have ever tasted a good anchovie. At the food processor where we get our tapenade made we started with the house recipe with a couple exceptions. Theri recip has anchovy paste in it, "yuck!" We brought our own anchovie fillets that were preserved in olive oil.

 

[jinman]

Rox, I have to plead guilty as charged. With anchovies, it was once and out. I never gave them a second chance after my initial taste. Heck! I should know better. There are hundreds of ways to cook potatoes. Just because I don't like one doesn't mean I don't love the other several hundred ways of cooking them. However, I still probably won't be ordering my pizza with anchovies anytime soon.

 

[Bird]

Jim, does anyone even still offer anchovies on their pizzas? I used to order my pizza with "everything but anchovies" but now they have so many ingredients they didn't offer on pizzas a few years ago, but I haven't seen anchovies in the lists of possible ingredients in a long time.

 

[scott_vt]

Jim, does anyone even still offer anchovies on their pizzas? I used to order my pizza with "everything but anchovies" but now they have so many ingredients they didn't offer on pizzas a few years ago, but I haven't seen anchovies in the lists of possible ingredients in a long time.

Good Evenin Bird,
You need to come to the North East, the birth place of pizza ! Actually, Wooster St New Haven, Ct.

Yes they do offer anchovies on pizza, I love them my wife hates them !

Obviously I dont get that pizza very often !