Crispy Rosemary Battered Olives

Marge (00:00:00) - June is a very special month for Bite Me. It marks the four year anniversary of the show and it also happens to be my birthday month. So I'm celebrating with an Epic giveaway. It's pretty simple. All you need to do to enter the giveaway is to join the Edibles Enthusiast email newsletter. If you're already a subscriber, you are already entered to win one. Like a winner will be chosen at the end of June and they'll be chosen to win Ale O two Oil infuser to help you take your edibles game to the next level. So again, head over to bite me podcast.com and enter today in good luck. In this week's episode of Bite Me, we're doing crispy rosemary battered olives. Welcome to Bite Me, the show about edibles where I help you take control of your high life. I'm your host and certified ganja Marge and I love helping cooks make safe and effective edibles at home. I'm so glad you're here and thank you for joining me today.

Marge (00:01:04) - I have been wanting to do this recipe for such a long time. I had it printed off. Yes, I still print recipes occasionally from the internet. I'm one of those people that's probably the Gen X in me. I'm actually getting a little better with not doing that now, saving the paper. But part of me still likes to print shit I know. But in any case, I printed it off and had it stuck to my corkboard for like the longest time and I finally got around to doing it now because it just sort of was the right time and I'm excited to share it with you. But before we get into it, we'll start with the cannabis fun fact.

Marge (00:01:42) - This fun fact I thought was pretty interesting. In October of 1937, Samuel Caldwell was the first US citizen arrested under the Marijuana Tax Act for selling marijuana without paying the newly mandated tax. He was fined $1,000 in sentenced to four years of hard labor in Leavenworth. And that actually came from the book Cannabis, A Hi History and written by Martin Booth. And I thought that was a pretty interesting fun fact because a thousand bucks, I mean back in 1937, that would've been an astronomical sum of money. And fast forward to today, that's still a pretty large sum of money, but the four years in prison of hard labor for not paying tax, that seems super heavy handed. But I guess that's how they were unrolling this first, uh, first look of prohibition back in the day. And so maybe this isn't really a cannabis fun fact, but more of a cannabis sad fact. Unfortunately I should look up to see what a thousand dollars in today's, what a thousand dollars would be worth today. And I'd probably be also sad at that number because this poor fellow really suffered as the first US citizen to be arrested under this tax act. So that is your interesting fact of the day. Fun fact, sad fact, interesting fact you can choose.

Marge (00:03:06) - Now there's something else I kind of wanted to try doing, but I listened to this other podcast called Your Mom's House. It's a comedy podcast run by two very famous comedians, Tom Segura, Christina pki, and they are married and do this show together. And it's sort of one of my guilty pleasure podcasts that I listen to. I listen to a lot of cannabis related podcasts, science, health and fitness, personal improvement, some languages, podcasts, like all kinds of things where learning new things and working my brain. And this one is a pure pleasure podcast. It's comedy, it's irreverent, it's offensive, it's all those things and it's unlike any other show that I'm listening to. But they always do these fun things like at drive-throughs where they get people to say, make a go through a drive-through and say I love you, or something like that. And I thought, what if the listeners have bite me started going through drive-throughs or even at counters like when you're ordering something and you know when they're like, Hey, what's your order?

Marge (00:04:09) - And you give 'em their order and they say thank you and you say stay. Hi. Wouldn't that be fun? If you guys actually start doing that, I might start doing it too. But if you record it, I'll play it on this show. I should find some examples of that for your mom's house. Maybe I can drop those into this episode or maybe on the webpage so you can see what it looks like. But I think it would be so much fun to try that to tell people, Hey, stay high. And that can mean whatever you want it to mean for those people out there, but I think it would be a lot of fun. So let's try it, shall we? If you do record it, it can be just by audio, then I will play it on this show. Let's give it a try, shall we?

Marge (00:04:44) - Let's see if it works. We'll find out pretty quickly because I'll obviously, if I don't upload any of that means none of you guys are setting them in and that would be really sad. So try let's, let's do something fun and silly because honestly, sometimes life is way too serious. I think it's especially right now. I mean this poor, this poor fucker in 1937 Samuel Caldwell. Well that was a pretty serious thing. But fast forward to today and things still seem pretty serious all the time. Inflation and rising interest rates and wars and all the rest of it. It's so easy to have such a firm grip on life because every time you turn around there's something going on. So finding a way to be light and playful in your life, I find a such a great remedy to all the seriousness that's always going around us.

Marge (00:05:34) - This could be one way to do that and to share some of the silliness with other people. Let's get into the recipe. Enough of that, let's get into these crispy rosemary battered olives. So like I said, I've been wanting to make these for quite a long time. They've been pinned to my corkboard and I discovered them through a chef that I learned about named Carolina ga. And I hope I'm saying her name correctly, she's based outta the US and I don't remember the details now she's not uh, she's not originally from the US but has had a long history of cooking. She makes these lovely recipes that seems so fun and approachable. Speaking of silliness, I mean not that anything she's doing is silly that she's making beautiful food and it's just good food with a lot of simple ingredients. There's not, there doesn't seem to be too much stuff where you have to go out and buy like really fancy, expensive specialty stuff.

Marge (00:06:27) - A lot of it's things that you probably have on hand. I mean in this particular instance you may have to go out and get something like Rosemary, but they're easily accessible recipes and I really love her approach to cooking. So I'll link to her website in the show notes. And I think I found out about out about her through Chef Steps, which I am, I do have a subscription to that website. They have a lot of really fun stuff over there too, so I can link to that as well. But they did sort of like a little video series on various chefs and interviewed them about their process and that kind of thing. And that's where I found out about her. But I just love her approach to food and I wish I had nearly the same amount of talent as she does. But this particular one really stood out to me because I love all of, it's not every day you see like a whole, I guess there are all of taps.

Marge (00:07:11) - And so I wanted to try olives because wouldn't deep frying olives make them even better? I mean I'll often eat olives right out of the jar, but in fact that's how I usually eat olives I guess. How else do you eat them really? But I wanted to try them as well because I wanted to invite my daughter over to enjoy them with me because she is also a huge lover of olives. Most of the time when she comes over to my house, she goes straight to my refrigerator to the jar of olives and then she will take out a few olives and enjoy them not uh, and perhaps we haven't even shared a word with each other yet. It's not really a big problem. Now I started buying Costco sized jars of olives and that's mainly because if she comes over and it was my last olive, she would eat it while giving me a slice smile.

Marge (00:07:59) - I have prepared now by having the Costco sized jar of olives so I don't have to keep buying the jars cuz those little ones that I was getting before really did seem to not last very long. And I do recall as well when she was still living at home as a teenager, she loved olives. Even then, it was kind of unusual I think. Anyway, I don't know too many other kids who were doing this, but she loved all of so much. I would buy like those canned cans of olives, some of the worst olives you could get. Those black ones, it almost tasted sort of like wood that you would get in the cans. I would buy those and she would have, she would open up a can and eat the entire can of olives. Those were the kinds of snacks that she often liked back in the day.

Marge (00:08:42) - So I thought it would be really nice to invite her over to enjoy this recipe with me because we both share this love of olives. She also really enjoys spending time in the kitchen, even though I did most of the work. I have to admit she did step in a couple times because she just can't help herself. She happens to run a a vegan gluten-free restaurant in my city and has a real creativity in the kitchen that I wish I just had. It's really fun to see her working sometimes in the kitchen. But I did most of this work this time and let her just sit and enjoy my company while I did all the stuff so I could serve her for once because that is one way that she shows her love is by, is by cooking for people. And it's really beautiful to see actually, in fact, the last time we had the whole family over, which wasn't that long ago, we had the whole gang over.

Marge (00:09:30) - We try and get over our get together about once a month. Sometimes that's easier said than done because schedules are kind of all over the place. But we all got together, we're hanging out and she offered to make coffee for everyone. Well I don't think she really knew what she was getting herself into because as it stands, I have I, I make coffee using an arrow press and if you don't know what that is, I'll link to it in the show notes. Actually, they're fantastic. They're great for traveling, they make excellent coffee, but they make about one coffee at a time pretty much, actually I guess sometimes you can do two, but for the most part it's like one coffee at a time. So she's making like six cups of coffee one at a time. It took her like half an hour to make all this coffee, but she brought it out, she served it.

Marge (00:10:12) - She was quite happy to do so. So of course when I got my new coffee maker in the mail today, I had to send her a picture of it right away. She knew it was coming, but I said, next time we all have everybody over. You won't have to get stuck making individual cups of coffee for everyone. Even though I really appreciated the service that she provided by doing that. That's just her love language, I guess how she likes to show people that she cares. But in any case, she loves olives. So I wanted to have her over and have someone to enjoy them with. And I didn't infuse the battered olives themselves, but the dipping sauce that is suggested alongside this recipe. And I used CBD oil because I knew she and I would be eating them all and we didn't wanna get too fucked up.

Marge (00:10:51) - I did have to drive her home. And I also had still have some chocolate coffee cake in my freezer that I have been enjoying each evening. And that gives me the full t h c effect I'm looking for as well. And it can be like a little dessert for afterwards too. So if you haven't checked out that episode, I definitely recommend that you go check it out because that coffee cake is so delicious. It's actually more like a tort. It's very little flour. So it's pretty like dense, it's a dense consistency but freezes beautifully. And that's how I've been enjoying it. And so I recommend you check out that recipe because you can keep that in your freezer and it's just ready to enjoy when, and of course if you, if you have, you know, if you want, you can always take out your piece of cake.

Marge (00:11:33) - You don't have to eat it cold if you don't like that, but I actually don't mind it. Now this, this particular recipe was pretty simple to make and if you already have your Costco sized jars of olives on hand and you're pretty much halfway there, because again, like I was saying about this chef, she doesn't really use any overly complicated ingredients. And I have to admit that the recipe was actually called crispy cheddar rosemary beer battered olives. So yes, I did fuck around with it. There's a reason for that. I didn't have beer on hand and so I used sparkling water instead, which is what she recommended within the recipe. So if you have beer, that's great, you only need about half a cup. So you know, depending if you're not gonna drink that beer, you're gonna be opening it up just for half a cup.

Marge (00:12:18) - But maybe that's an excuse to enjoy beer while you're cooking. But if you don't have beer, you don't drink the sparkling water work just fine. And I usually have sparkling water on hand cause I do happen to like that as well. Now the olives that I tend to buy are garlic stuffed and I didn't want to remove the garlic and stuff them with cheddar. And that's sort of what the original recipe was written for you to do. And to me that seemed pretty tedious because you have to have your, I did have a nice sharp cheddar that was like pretty solid, but you'd have to like put it into pieces and then stuff the garlic with it and settling this 20 minute prep time seemed like it was gonna take longer to me. You know what I love garlic stuffed olives. That's pretty much all I ever buy my daughter and I agreed, do you know what?

Marge (00:13:01) - We're just going to not worry about the cheese and use the garlic stuffed instead. Would it have been good with the cheese? I'm sure it would've. And perhaps from of these days I will try it with the cheddar because I happen to love cheese as well as as the garlic. But I mean I would've had to take it all the pieces of garlic. And I love the garlic, I just love it. I just love everything about the garlic stuffed, all those. So I just left that part out. But of course you can do what what you want. I will probably make these again because they were fun and they make like they'd be a fun appetizer at a gathering or whatever the case might be. Fuck, I love saying whatever the case might be. I've really noticed that lately. That's something I don't think I've always done. If you are a little short on time or you're not big into cheese or you have lactose issues, just skip it. And, but the garlic stuffed I thought was really nice. I don't know if it was like the pimento, is that what's usually stuffed in garlics? I don't know how well that would've worked. The garlic is a bit of a stronger flavor as with the sharp cheddar cheese. You do you, that's a great thing about these recipes is that you can figure out and do it however you want.

Marge (00:14:06) - So those are the two big things that I made. The big changes that I made is that I didn't stuff them with garlic and I used sparkling water instead of beer. But other than that, everything else was pretty straightforward. I'm trying to look at this recipe here as far as what you needed. You needed all-purpose flour, cornstarch, baking powder. You know what, it just dawned on me right now that I did not put in baking powder. I didn't really seem to notice a difference, but you should probably put that in I, I just occurred to me right now that I did not put that in, huh. Anyway, moving on. It also called for freshly cracked black pepper, fresh rosemary, your sparkling water, pinch of salt neutral oil for frying, some cayenne pepper for for dusting afterwards if you so choose. That's optional of course. And that's the basis for the the battered olives.

Marge (00:15:02) - Again, nothing fancy, but I would recommend that it's worth getting the fresh rosemary because the rosemary really shone through in this recipe and was a really nice addition. So if you can, don't skip the rosemary and that might be one of the only things you need to run out and buy if you're doing this and you don't already have the olives on hand of course, but who doesn't already have olives on hand and kicking around in the back of the fridge somewhere? I'm sure you do. I'm sure you do. Now the dipping sauce was a really nice pairing with this particular recipe and it was simple. Again, you may need a couple things for that, but it was, it was garlic chives or scallions Greek yogurt, mayo and lime juice salt. That was pretty much it. And that's what I infused for this particular recipe.

Marge (00:15:48) - I used infused C B D olive oil, which didn't really call for it, but I mixed some of that in because it's the simplest way to infuse this dish. And I love simple and I love infusing sauces and dips because they're usually so easy. It turns any dish from bland to bam. Am I right? And that way too, you can sort of dial back or sort of dial in how much you're consuming. You know what's going in there. And if you want more of the main course or the main dish without some of that extra sauce that's infused, then you can certainly do that. And then of course you can always remove some sauce and infuse some of it in one dish and some of it in another if you have people who also aren't imbibing along with you. So that was super easy to do as well.

Marge (00:16:29) - Now my daughter actually just wanted a hot sauce with these and it actually seemed to work as well. We used some Frank's hot sauce, we had some of that out too. And a spicy mayo that I made, which is in this case a simple spicy mayo of just some mayonnaise mixed with hot sauce. That's what I often do a lot of the times. And that was really good too. So you could, you, you could obviously choose whatever dipping sauce that you want and infuse that however you wish. And that's the easiest way to get going with that one. And then basically while you're, you're deep frying your olives in a pot, it said you use a neutral oil. I use avocado oil cuz that's what I have on hand. I don't tend to use canola oil. And I was like, damn, this is why people use those less expensive canola oils because it did use quite a bit.

Marge (00:17:13) - But I am going to use the oil for something else, I think so that I don't waste it. But you deep fry them in the oil for about five to seven minutes. They get nice and brown and crispy. You put them out on a paper towel over like a, a drying rack of some kind. And then when they're all done, you put that nice layer of, of cayenne pepper as a sprinkle of CORs salt. And she also had you deep frying some of the, uh, rosemary itself and you put that over top too. And that was actually really nice. Now the rosemary only took about 30 seconds to deep fry, whereas the olives themselves, it was about five to seven minutes before they got really brown and crispy and you could do a few at a time. I think we ended up doing like three or four batches at a time just based on the size of the pot that I was working with.

Marge (00:18:00) - You might be able to more than I could, but of course the larger the pot or the, you know, wider the base, the more oil you had to put in it. So there's pros and cons to each. I don't do a lot of deep frying, so this was kind of new for me, but it was definitely worth the results and they tasted so good it did not disappoint. So I encourage you to try these out if you're an Olives fan like myself and like my daughter, and let me know what you think and I suggest you check out the chef as well. Like I said, I'll have all of that in the show notes. She's super talented. Now she doesn't work with culinary cannabis, but that doesn't mean you can't use her recipes as inspiration and medicate them yourself because of course I'm a firm believer in tweaking things the way you want to so you can take control of your high life and why not infuse whatever it is that you want, including the beautiful dishes that she's baking.

Marge (00:18:49) - I already have another dish of hers that I'm going to be doing for next week's show because I have a few recipes that I pulled from her website and she's got a lot of great recipes over there. So again, I'll have that in the show so you can check that out. And I'd love to have her on the show sometime to talk about her story and and her cooking process. And if she's ever used cannabis in the kitchen, I think that'd be super interesting. So if you know anybody who knows anybody who's got a line on how to get ahold of her, that'll be wonderful. And I think that's it for this week. Now, I would encourage you, if you are know somebody who happens to be a lover of olives as well, please share this episode with them. And of course you can always talk to me.

Marge (00:19:26) - We've got the podcast hotline, you can reach me by email. I do have a new email address. Stay [email protected], or you can always reach me at the old email address as well. And if you wanna stay up to date with news events, questions for guests, giveaways, all that kind of fun stuff, then I highly suggest you join the Edibles Enthusiast email newsletter because that allows me to try and keep these episodes timeless, whereas the more, uh, time sensitive stuff will go into the newsletter. And I think that's it for this week, my friends. Until next time, enjoy some rosemary battered olives and say hi. Are you tired of trying edibles that are inconsistent and strengthened flavor attempting to figure out your tolerance? Do you want to take control of your edibles experience and find the optimum combination of factors that results in the best outcome?

Marge (00:20:15) - If so, this edibles journal is perfect for you. The Bite Me Edibles Journal provides a convenient and organized way for you to track and record your edibles experience. Whether it's homemade, edibles or store bought, it includes 48 fillable pages. It's sized eight and a half by 11 for plenty of writing space. Includes information on calculating the potency of homemade edibles and it was created by an edibles expert. Whether you're a seasoned edibles enthusiast, or just starting out on your cannabis journey, the Bite Me Edibles Journal is an essential tool for anyone interested in enjoying their edibles to the fullest. Take control of your high life with this convenient and helpful resource. Add it to your Amazon cart today. Tap the link in the show notes.