O-Live

 

 I made another batch of banana muffins with a change in the recipe.  They are for the Yarn Retreat book I'm working on now that I'm calling KNOT A GAME.

A while back I was looking for themes to hang a new series on and I considered olive oil. I grew up thinking that there were two kinds of olives.  The green ones with the red stuff stuck in them that I didn't particularly like and the black mushy ones that had a mild taste that I did like.  I couldn't understand what happened to the shriveled black one that I saw at delis.  My whole view of olives and their oil changed when I started doing research.  I bought books, went to an olive ranch near Paso Robles and did an olive oil tasting, saw soaps and cream made from them.  I tasted different kinds of olives and learned about how they had to be cured to be edible. You can't just pick olives off a tree and eat them.  I found out the hard way.  Ewew, it was really awful.  

Olive trees are very pretty with their dusty green slender leaves.  Olives are drupes like cherries. The oil has been around for thousands of years.  The oil that was a miracle for Hannukah was olive oil.  

I have never been a big fan of vegetable oil. It seems artificial and processed to me.  I always stuck with butter when it came to baking.

But after all that thought about olives and olive oil, I saw olive oil in a different light and to me it seemed  in a different category than canola oil, grapeseed oil, corn oil, etc.  Olive oil has much less processing.  It's just squeezed out of olives.  I tasted a version that still had bits of olives in it when I went to the olive ranch.   Even the slightly greenish color seemed more appealing than all those too golden oils.

I was curious about baking with it, but also hesitant since I thought of it being used in salad dressing and savory things like sauteing vegetable and garlic, I wondered how it would be in something sweet.  The first thing I tried was a carrot cake recipe I have been making for ages.  It turned out great. And I was suddenly glad that Costco sold huge bottles of extra virgin olive oil.  It was like let the baking begin.  Using oil has an advantage over butter in that it makes things moister.  But baked goods made with butter seem to stay fresher longer.  Though around here that doesn't seem to matter since nothing stays around very long.

The first batch of banana muffins were baked with butter and half and half for the liquid.  The above one were made with olive oil and soy milk.  They were moister than the ones made with butter and the texture was a little different.  I say "was" because they disappeared just like the first batch.  I used different paper cup inserts for the second batch that couldn't hold as much batter.  I ended up with more, but smaller muffins that baked faster.

In the end, my agent nixed the idea for olive oil mysteries, but the time spent doing all that research was hardly wasted.  I loved doing it and it left me forever changed.