Make your own dipping olive oil

Each year, at the end of gardening season,  my vegetable beds and pots leave me with a whole lot of chili peppers,  which I usually string and dry and let dangle from a cabinet’s knob to be used in coming year.

My little garden also leaves with some herbs such as mint and rosemary (which I am too lazy to do anything with!) and with unripe green tomatoes, which I do make some use of, such as this one here, if I find time.

This year I found a marvelous and super tasty solution to using my home grown products at the end of the season: Dipping olive oil.  Making the mix is super easy, and once you try it on your salad and foods you will wonder how on earth you have been living without it thus far!? 😉 You could of course buy all the ingredients, home-grown or not would not make a huge difference in the taste.

Ingredients:

• 3 cups extra-virgin olive oil
• 10-12 cloves garlic
• 5 hot peppers
• 2 steams of rosemary, or oregano (1 teaspoon dried)
• 1 teaspoon grain black pepper
• Salt to taste

Method: The only time consuming, and most fun, part is related to preparing garlic. Cut off the two ends of garlic cloves and place them on the barbecue grill with the skin on, or load them up on stick and grill them for a few minutes, until they slightly change the color and smell a bit like smoke.  You may want to do this when you are grilling your dinner or lunch on a weekend so hurry up before the barbecue season is over!  And as I have always advocated, grilling with charcoal makes a world of difference in the richness of the taste of any kind of meat and vegetable.

Pour the olive oil in an appropriate bottle, and dissolve your salt in. Cut the garlic cloves in two or four and toss them in. Cut most of your red peppers before tossing them inside the bottle too, but keep one or two in whole just for the their pretty look if you wish.  Stick in the rosemary. Pepper grains go inside the bottle too but are mainly for visual effect.

The Oil needs to sit for at least three weeks for the all the tastes to release and mingle. You could refill the olive oil part a few times though.  Sprinkle this on thinly sliced onion & tomatoes; steam-cooked asparagus, boiled beans and it will turn them into a real FOOD for you. Better still, just boil and drain spaghetti and use this as the sauce. The taste is rich yet smoky, remote, delicate and truly amazing.