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Among the many little comments in my travel notebook, I have written "always plenty of olive oil, always plenty of salt." While I suppose these points could hardly be called the "secret" of anything, they were certainly impressed upon me when we went to stay in Fermo with the Acciaris, the Italian family that A. lived with when she did her home stay in high school. Adriana, the matriarch, is very secure in her opinions and very good at making very good food. (Also very good at making you eat more than you ever thought possible.) She most definitely believes in using plenty of olive oil, and even made a little speech about how it is extremely important to put some in your babies' cereal mush. The result is certainly tasty, and I was smugly pleased to observe that it didn't seem to be making anyone fat, either.
The Acciaris have a little olive grove that provides all their olive oil for the year--a not inconsiderable amount!--but I am not so lucky. So I have been thinking about how best to meet my own oily needs. I have been using the big metal containers and decanting it into my useful little metal oil can. The can is great, but pouring from the original container is most definitely not. It's awkward and annoying and goes blurp blurp splooge all over everything.
What I really want is olive oil on tap. It would be more satisfying if, instead of the little spout on top, the big cans had a spigot at the bottom like the kind you get on large containers of drinking water. However, they do not. What to do? A. had the inspired notion of using a glass iced-tea jar. I think it might be just the thing. It would be easy to fill from the big can, and relatively simple to keep clean, too. It would be entertaining to put it right next to our flour jar, which always inspires comments about what an absurdly large amount (in reality about the smallest amount that doesn't require annoyingly frequent refilling) of flour it holds, and stupefy visitors with our strange food storage ways. I suppose it would probably be best, though, to find a home for it where it would be less exposed to light and therefore also to visitors' eyes.
Posted by redfox at June 14, 2002 01:33 PM (etcetera)all breads | breakfast | dinner reports | drink | eating out | essays | etcetera | lunch | news | recipes | salads | snacks | soups | sweets | tips | travel | vegetables | weekly meals |
