OliveOilLovers.com - The best selection of olive oils online!

One of the most common things I hear is, "Ok, all this talk about what good quality extra virgin olive oil is, but where do I go to buy it?" Well wonder no more, your answer is finally here! Now everyone, anywhere in the Continental US has access to one of the best selections of extra virgin olive oil from some of the world's top producers, and can have it delivered right to their doorstep over at www.oliveoillovers.com.

This is a wonderful online shop where you can begin exploring a multitude of varieties of olive oils from various oil-producing regions. These are some of the best oils out there, produced by small family estates who put their heart and soul into their quality and production.

So for your next home-gathering, why not throw an olive oil tasting party and have fun comparing the wide range of flavor notes from a full selection of regional oils! I'm about to throw my 2nd annual harvest tasting party coming up again next month and can't wait!

Quinoa Salad with Honey-Lime Vinaigrette

In the midst of getting knocked-out this summer by heat wave after heat wave, my craving for salads has been endless; however, eating salads night after night can get a little mundane, especially when my go-to dressing is just a basic combination of extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Well, it's time to switch it up and start experimenting with salad dressings - one of the most ideal ways of using extra virgin olive oil.

Greens are greens, but they can transform depending on what you put on them. I was inspired after eating lunch a couple months ago at a vegan restaurant in my neighborhood, where salads are their obvious specialty. Now I'm no vegan, but it was their Quinoa salad with an amazingly tasty honey-lime vinaigrette that had me going back. After a few attempts to get the dressing just right, it has now become one of my favorite salads to make at home.

For the Salad:

Cooked Quinoa
Mixed leafy greens
Sweet Corn
Red Pepper
Avocado

As it is a salad, use as little or as much of each ingredient as you like. First, prepare some quinoa according to the package directions and let cool. I like to prepare a batch of it and keep it in the fridge for future salad-making. Go crazy with mixing up the greens. I found a great mix at my local farmer's market with spinach, red leaf, mustard greens, pea shoots, and watercress. With greens, the common rule is that the more bitter-tasting the green, the more nutrients it holds. I also found some fresh New Jersey sweet corn at the market as its just now coming into season, so cut the corn off the fresh cob and add it raw to the bowl of greens (yes, you can eat it raw and it's delicious!). Next, add some cooked quinoa then top-off the salad with some thinly-sliced red pepper and sliced ripe avocado.

For the Vinaigrette:

3 tsp. Dijon Mustard
2 tsp. Honey
1/2 tsp. Fresh Lime Juice
1/3 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil

I find this recipe to make enough for about 3-4 single-serving meal-sized salads and I used Greek Thyme Honey, the juice of one small key lime, and a wonderfully fruity Nocellara extra virgin olive oil from Sicily. Add all ingredients to a small bowl and whisk until smooth and creamy. Store any leftover dressing in a jar for up to a week.

No really, fat is GOOD for you.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Fat is not as evil as we deemed it in the 80's (we only got fatter) and the poor nutrient is in a desperate need of a media makeover. Sure, it's not as simple as 'eat as much fat as you like, it won't matter,' but we do need to start looking at fat in a different light.

Tom Mueller, author of Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, tackles the subject in Olive Oil and the F Word where he reminds us that fat "controls and modulates your fertility, your appetite and your mood" as well as your immune system. A healthy intake of natural fat also keeps your skin and hair soft and radiant. I remember my favorite esthetician once telling me how she could tell which clients were on low-fat diets due to their skin appearing more thin, dry and dull. Great skin, a healthy immune system, and a regulated metabolism - isn't this what we all want?

So the challenge today is how to convince the general public that it's OK to eat some fat. Perhaps we need to look to Southern Europe, and Greece especially, where families consume large amounts of olive oil - whole pitchers of the stuff - in a matter of days and yet obesity is rare. And it's not just olive oil. Look at the French, for instance. The entire country lives off of cream, butter, and cheese and we envy their waistlines. It's certainly time to start asking some questions. In the meantime, pour on the olive oil!

Light and Simple Veggies

Spring is officially here, and with the warmer weather arrives an abundance of fresh spring vegetables. Those garden vegetables and leafy greens are just begging to be steamed and doused in fresh extra virgin olive oil. No complexity here, just three basic ingredients: sea salt, fresh squeezed lemon, and extra virgin olive oil - if you have it, the grassiness of a fresh Koroneiki oil from Greece is positively delicious on veggies!

A simple way to prepare some basic veggies and offer a great side-dish to any meal, is to prepare them steamed or lightly boiled. It can be as basic as potatoes and zucchini, or you can add carrots, cauliflower, or broccoli - just about anything works. Simply steam or boil the veggies to your desired texture. If using potatoes, I usually boil them first for 10 minutes, then add the other veggies to cook for another 10-15 minutes. When ready, place the cooked veggies in a dish, sprinkle with salt, squeeze some fresh lemon, and pour on the olive oil! It may not sound all that exciting, but if you're using a fresh, flavorful olive oil, it will bring the vegetables to a whole new level.


Have some leafy greens you're not sure what to do with? Just lightly steam them, then pour-on those three simple ingredients! If you are lucky enough to live in Crete, you have a plethora of amazing wild greens to choose from this time of year. One of my favorites is stamnagathi (pictured), a nutritiously bitter local green, also known as spiny chicory. Not in Crete? No problem - any greens will do. Try spinach, dandelion, kale, collards, mustard, or chard. All fiber-packed veggies are rich in vitamins A, C, K and folate. Throw some omega-3, antioxidant-rich extra virgin olive oil on them and you're all set for your next clean bill of health!

Olive Pomace Oil: What it is and why to avoid it.

Olive Pomace Oil - you may have come across this product conspicuously placed next to the extra virgin olive oils in your local supermarket and wondered what exactly this stuff is. You see the word 'olive', it's next to the extra virgin, and the packaging sure looks nice - a romantic picture of a woman happily picking olives from a tree in the fields of Italy somewhere. Don't be fooled. Olive pomace oil is actually a bi-product of olive oil pressing and is heavily refined - placing it in the same category of oils as Canola, Corn, Vegetable or any other refined seed oil. Remember, whatever oils you're using, if you can't literally squeeze oil out of it (ever tried squeezing oil out of a corn kernal?), it's been heavily refined.

So what exactly does it mean when you hear the words 'refined oil' and why the negative connotation? In an excerpt from Tom Mueller's excellent book, Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, the author visits a pomace plant in Italy where they receive and process "huge piles of pomace, the solid residue of olive skins, stems, pits, and leaves left over from olive oil extraction, which actually still contains about 8 percent of the oil made by the olives." He goes on to explain the process:

"Front-end loaders dump the pomace into a large hopper, from which it moves into a steel tube heated by the furnaces, that rotates slowly until most of the moisture in the pomace has evaporated. The dried pomace is transferred into tall silos and drenched with hexane, and industrial solvent. After the residual oil dissolves into the hexane, leaving the pomace, a blast of steam as loud as a cannon-shot drives the mixture of solvent and oil into a separate tank, where it's heated to evaporate off the hexane. What's left is a dense, black liquid known as crude pomace oil. Before this oil can be sold as food, it's piped into a refinery in an adjoining building for desolventization, deacidification, deodorization, degumming, and other chemical processes. The resulting clear, odorless, tasteless fat is blended with a small quantity of extra virgin olive oil to give it flavor, and is sold as "olive pomace oil."

Mmm, sounds delicious, no? Basically all of the healthful properties that make extra virgin olive oil such an amazing super food are all but lost in the refining process of pomace oil and what you are left with is no better than any other seed oil, which in my opinion should all be avoided as much as possible.

I feel this is an important topic to discuss after a recent conversation with some family members who were enjoying an evening dinner at an up-scale restaurant in their area. As is common today, their waitress started off their meal with a basket of bread and a dish of oil for dipping. When asked what kind of olive oil it was, the waitress returned from the kitchen, proudly stating that it was a pomace oil from Italy! Now I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be given butter, thank you! You wouldn't dip your bread in canola oil now, would you?

Therefore I offer a challenge: the next time you are at a restaurant being served oil in that little white dish, to ask what kind of oil it is. Of course taste is a dead giveaway, too. If the oil has very little flavor, any hint of rancidity (think of the taste of crayons), or is abnormally light in color, much like a vegetable oil, kindly suggest to your server, restaurant owner, or chef, that the oil they are serving has no business on their guests' tables and should be used strictly in the kitchen for cooking and frying. The more restaurants realize their customers' knowledge of olive oil is expanding, and that there is a demand for real extra virgin olive oil, the more they will listen and meet that demand.

Citrus Almond Olive Oil Cake

Agree to bring the dessert to your next holiday gathering? Break out the olive oil! Your guests won't believe you baked a dessert without butter or canola.

Olive oil lends a surprising moistness to cakes, and this one comes out beautifully, without being too rich or overly sweet. But be sure to use extra virgin - don't believe those myths that say it's better to cook with 'pure' olive oil, which is just another refined oil. Stick to the good stuff. Always.

What you'll need:

1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup almond flour (usually found in the natural foods section at your grocer)
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon sea salt
3 eggs
3/4 cup granulated sugar (I like it a little less sweet and only use 1/2 cup)
1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon pure almond extract
Grated zest of either 1 lemon, or half an orange - or mix 'em up!
1/2 cup fresh squeezed orange juice

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and grease a round 9-inch cake pan. In a medium bowl, whisk together the all-purpose flour, almond flour, baking powder and sea salt and set aside. In a larger bowl, lightly whisk the eggs, then add the sugar and whisk for about 30 seconds. Next, add the olive oil to the egg mixture and whisk until slightly thickened. Last, whisk in the vanilla and almond extracts along with the orange juice. Add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients until you have a smooth batter, then pour into the greased pan and bake for 30 - 45 minutes. Test the cake by inserting a toothpick into the middle to see that it comes out clean.

After you pull the cake out of the oven, let it cool in the pan for about ten minutes and prepare the glaze in the meantime.

For the glaze you will need:

2 tablespoons butter
1/2 - 1 cup confectioner's sugar (depending on how much glaze you like on your cake)
3 tablespoons milk (I usually just add it until my desired thickness)
fresh lemon juice to taste (I like mine lemony and use about a teaspoon)
1/4 cup sliced, blanched almonds, toasted

First, toast the almonds on a baking sheet under the broiler until slightly browned. Set aside to cool. Next, melt the butter over medium heat in a small saucepan, swirly occasionally, until the butter turns a slight brown color and begins to smell a little nutty. While the butter cools, sift the confectioners sugar into a medium bowl, then whisk in the milk, and then slowly add the butter, whisking until combined. Next, add a few drops of fresh lemon juice to your desired taste, then stir in the toasted almonds. Carefully spread the glaze over the top of the cake with a spatula until it begins to drip slightly down the sides. Let the cake sit until the glaze is dry and then it's ready to serve.

Being that this is a slightly more dense cake, it can be served in smaller slices to a larger, hungry crowd. I also find that it freezes very well, and only takes a few short minutes at room temperature before it's ready to eat.

Hosting Thanksgiving?

Here is a marvelous article posted by the folks over at The Olive Oil Times for some tasty ways to add olive oil to your upcoming Thanksgiving meal: http://www.oliveoiltimes.com/olive-oil-basics/olive-oil-thanksgiving/8905