Rox's EVOO(Olive Oil) for sale on Amazon!

[bindian]

Rox,
You got me hungry explaining that meal. My son is a chef also. Here is a dish he made for a you tube cooking show his friend makes. It was just made from stuff on hand in her refrigerator. I guess you could call it refrigerator surprise. Last week he cooked a whole hog for resort guests. I need to get that photo moved to this computer.
hugs, Brandi

 

[dmccarty]

Rox,

Twas cruel showing use what you husband can prepare!!!!! :laughing::laughing::laughing:

The first course was a tomato buffalo mozzarella salad. Buffalo mozzarella we get out of Italy, it is milk from buffaloes (not cows) that the mozzarella is made from. He reduced balsamic vinegar that he had added a little sugar to to make basically a balsamic vinegar syrup. He built a tower using sliced tomatoes, then he took large shrimp, and sliced them lengthwise so that they were not so fat, then the mozzarella. Inside the layers he drizzled our basil olive oil, and then over the top he drizzled the balsamic vinegar syrup.

I make a tomato buffalo mozzarella salad from time to time but never added shrimp. That is a good idea. :thumbsup::laughing::laughing::laughing: We can get real buffalo mozzarella locally even in our rural area but it is expensive but good and worth it when the tomatoes are fresh off the vine.

Thankfully, we still have a bit of EVOO left but we are starting to run out. We need a good harvest so we can have a resupply!

Later,
Dan

 

[rox]

Rox,

Twas cruel showing use what you husband can prepare!!!!! :laughing::laughing::laughing:



I make a tomato buffalo mozzarella salad from time to time but never added shrimp. That is a good idea. :thumbsup::laughing::laughing::laughing: We can get real buffalo mozzarella locally even in our rural area but it is expensive but good and worth it when the tomatoes are fresh off the vine.

Thankfully, we still have a bit of EVOO left but we are starting to run out. We need a good harvest so we can have a resupply!

Later,
Dan

Oh you are lucky if you can get local buffalo mozzarella, the fresher it is the better it is. As it ages, even within the Best Use By Date, it gets harder, the outer skin gets harder. What I like about his presentation was creating it as a tower as typically we would fan out the ingredients on the plate, not build a tower. Of course when you eat it you kind of have to deconstruct the tower but it makes an impressive presentation. You can also swap out the shrimp for lobster. He assembled them about 2 hours before we served and we kept them off in a cool room, you want to be careful carrying them, don't want your tower to fall down.

I got a nice e-mail from our customer that one of the other ladies ordered fish soup 3 more times on the remainder of the trip just so she could compare them to the soup Nico made, that was pretty cool. We always want people's visit to our olive farm to be the highlight of their vacation, and get many follow ups that the visit was the highlight of their trip. Particularly if they are Americans and we are not otherwise busy we will invite them up to the balcony overlooking the olive trees and have a drink, even just a glass of water or a Coke and sit & talk with them, or as my grandma used to say visit, we visit with them.

 

[rox]

Rox,
You got me hungry explaining that meal. My son is a chef also. Here is a dish he made for a you tube cooking show his friend makes. View attachment 525372 It was just made from stuff on hand in her refrigerator. I guess you could call it refrigerator surprise. Last week he cooked a whole hog for resort guests. I need to get that photo moved to this computer.
hugs, Brandi

Thanks for sharing, yeah chef's can just throw things together out of random stuff in the refrigerator. Cooking a hog isn't all that hard, what's hard is carving it up once it's done and serving it.

 

[rox]

Dan, I wonder if you have ever had Braised Belgium Endive? You cook it and caramelize it with butter & sugar. Have you ever had that? If not next time we make it I'll take a pic & post it for you. The endive is rather bitter & the contrast between the bitterness of the endive & the Carmel is delicious.

 

[dmccarty]

Dan, I wonder if you have ever had Braised Belgium Endive? You cook it and caramelize it with butter & sugar. Have you ever had that? If not next time we make it I'll take a pic & post it for you. The endive is rather bitter & the contrast between the bitterness of the endive & the Carmel is delicious.

We have not had Braised Belgium Endive but I have made dishes with Endive. :licking: I can't remember WHAT I did with the Endive though. :confused3::shocked: But it was good whatever I did. When I am cooking, I don't really follow recipes, I just see what I have or is at the store, and come up with something.

The wifey said I have only made one bad meal and she was right. The black beans with shrimp stock seemed like a good idea at the time. :thumbdown::laughing::laughing::laughing:

Later,
Dan

 

[Kyle_in_Tex]

Good stories all.

Rox and Nico, you two really know how to put on the ritz!

I like to call them "visits" too.

 

[gsganzer]

I'm almost out of my Jethro jug (I think we bought a 1 or 2 liter can of it) of Rox's Aglandau olive oil. Time to find some more.

 

[bindian]

"We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions." - Ronald Reagan

I love Ronald Reagan quotes. I haven't seen this one before.
Wish I would have paid more attention to him while he was in office. But I was raising two youngens and trying to make ends meet.
hugs, Brandi

 

[rox]

The customers are sure happy we are pressing the olives for them and they are getting really HIGH yields. I pressed some Salonenque olives 2 days ago and got just over a 26% yield (ratio of kilos olives to kilo weight of oil). We picked our first Salonenque today and tomorrow morning we'll press them, I hope we get good yields I don't see why we wouldn't, tomorrow the rubber meets the road. Last year the yields were low so a high yielding year is in order. I know I have the levels set on the centrifuge just perfect, in addition to the fruit itself that also is critical to getting a good yield, setting the levels to the optimum level, and there is no instruction book for this, no youtube video to go watch, this is something you learn by experience.

Cool customer story. This youngish couple & their son about 12 year old son show up with olives for us to press, they say this is their first year they bought a house and the house has olive trees so this is their first year picking. They brought us 200 kilos of Salonenque olives and usually for every customer as the oil falls out of the centrifuge into the stainless steel bucket I'll run my finger through the oil stream and get a taste. Boy their oil was sure delicious so when I called them I told them that their oil was the best oil I had pressed so far this year. The husband came that night to pick up their oil and come to find out that we knew the old owner (now deceased) of the house they bought. Jean Arnold was very very good to Nico and I when we were first starting out learning olive farming, we had eaten dinner at his house and he at ours it really put a smile on my face that the successor to our friend John Arnold was bringing his olives to us to press and how wonderful that olive oil was.

Jean was an interesting guy. After WWII it must have been part of the Marshal plan or something anyway Jean got accepted into a program and shipped off to the United States to learn farming. He worked on an apple farm I think in New York, and then another farm. This was an educational program this was not like immigrant/migrant labor, there was some formal schooling attached to it. I think he was in the States 2 maybe 3 years and when he came back he met and married his wife. France needed to rebuild their country after the war and so they basically gave farmland away at rock bottom prices, but you had to farm it, rather like our old homesteading. The government sold the land. Jean since he had worked on fruit farms in the US he planted fruit trees, including olive trees, he ended up buying a lot of land, like he said why not (?) it's practically free. His wife tells the story of how she didn't have a washing machine and 3 little kids so she used to take her laundry to her aunts house and then bring it back all heavy & wet to hang it and dry, his wife was an incredible woman as well she became a school teacher. So it is really cool that we are still pressing Jean Arnolds olives, he died but his trees live on, still producing delicious olive oil.