Olives

and how they made me become a chef.

I’m in love with everything olive. The oil. The trees. The fruit. Here’s how it happened.

I attended UC Davis in the early 90s. It was here that I found my biggest source of joy, my passion, really, my obsession. Not at the school, per se, but at the jobs I needed to work in order to stay in the school. No, it was cooking that captivated me. More specifically, it was food. 

I graduated in 1994 and flew to Spain, after finishing a summer course (yep, I was that person who was one unit shy of the needed units). Actually I flew to Frankfurt to meet a childhood friend who was in the U.S. Army and we drove a harrowing all-night drive to Barcelona. After un cafecito and a wash in the ocean, he departed. I took an overnight train to Málaga and then a bus to Marbella. Why Marbella? A friend of a friend was opening a Tex-Mex restaurant and seeing as I had five years experience as a line cook, and could pretty much cook circles around anyone else, I assumed he’d be excited to see a fellow Aggie and hire me on the spot. What I didn’t know was that the Marbella tourist season ended the week I showed up. With not much to do, I rented a room in a house, and wandered the streets, broke but with enough money to buy ingredients at the farmer’s market on the Spanish side of town to make simple meals. I’d buy a head of beautiful butter-type lettuce, a lemon, a bottle of olive oil, and a Halal rotisserie chicken. Believe it or not this simple meal would be enough for three dinners. One day while walking through the market, I came upon the olive vendor. I’m not sure how I didn’t notice him before. I like to think I wasn’t ready. 

This guy's booth was actually two tents, not one like everyone else’s. He had three long tables filled with different kinds of olives: there were tiny brown ones swimming in brine with herbs, bright green ones the size of plums, wrinkled deep black ones sticky with fragrant oil, and there were multitudes in between. Up until this point in my life, the only experience I had with olives was the ones that came in my stepdad’s martinis and the ubiquitous canned Oberti that I’d devour whenever my mom or dad brought these home from the supermarket. Like all kids, my sister and I would tip each finger with an olive and slowly slide them off into our salivating mouths. They were a perfect entry point for us kids: slightly briny, crunchy, but without any of the pungency that most olives have.

To see the variety this merchant sold blew my mind right open. It was as if the whole world opened up to me: all that I didn't know, all that I could discover, right there on his table. If the universe of olives was this big, what about every other ingredient? I mean, how many kinds of tomatoes were there? How many peppers? This mind fuck made me realize that I needed to learn more. No, I needed to learn everything about food, and that I could use my skills as a line cook to get into the kitchens where I could, perhaps one day, become a chef. 

Yes, it all started with olives, a fruit that in America had been largely unknown to me. When I returned to the States, I moved to San Francisco and begged my way into a restaurant where I learned that olives, maybe three or four different varieties, were often on the menu. We made tapenade with niçoise, braised pork with picholines, rough chopped oil-cured black olives for halibut in broth, and warmed all three in a bath of olive oil, garlic cloves, rosemary and citrus zest for a snacky appetizer. Not quite the enormous variety I’d seen in Spain, but far more than my American experience provided thus far. 

Many years later, after working in dozens of restaurants, I met the man who would become my husband. (Of course we met at a restaurant.) When we honeymooned, we ended up in Assisi, where we bought a salami, a hunk of cheese, and a loaf of crusty bread, strolled up the one road out of the town to find the perfect picnic spot. After a couple miles, we found an olive orchard, where we laid down our wares, high above the valley below. We talked about staying in Europe versus returning to the States. What could we bring back with us, if we were to return. Or what could we bring to somewhere in Europe; a cheese shop in Bandol, a bistro in Brussels??? Ah, the creativity that idle times allow. Not one month later, while in Barcelona, we discovered we were pregnant. Nothing awakens one to reality quicker than an unplanned pregnancy. Besides knowing we needed to return to the States, stat, we knew we had one name and one name only if this child would be born a girl: Olive. And she really is the perfect little olive.