2008 Olive Harvest - The End

The unreliable neighbor in our mini-cooperative still has not returned to Izzalini to pick his olives. The rest of us have decided to quietly eliminate him from our group effort. Next year we'll look for another partner. Or maybe our own trees will have such an abundance of fruit we won't need one. Time will tell.


In the meantime, we're looking forward to transferring our oil to one-liter bottles and celebrating the harvest with bruschetta. There's nothing quite as satisfactory as slicing up a loaf of day-old country-style bread, toasting it over wood coals and then annointing it with fresh, home-grown oil. Our local bread, called pane comune, is made without salt and is a perfect foil for the tasting. Thereafter, I do sprinkle a bit of salt on the bread but I don't tell anybody.

If you'd like to see bruschetta-making, click on today's title.