Tapenade

Tapenade is another of those dishes which it is hard to believe folk buy rather than make. Assembling a number of your preferred tapenade ingredients and blitzing them together is all that is required, the end product keeps in the fridge for a week or two, but the biggest advantage is you can vary the proportions or even the ingredients to suit yourself. On the whole the ingredients are already preserved, olives, anchovies and capers, with the addition of fresh garlic, olive oil and a little lemon juice, but I like to occasionally add sun dried tomatoes or preserved artichokes or spike it up a little with some cayenne pepper and dried savoury.

Few jobs are messier than stoning black olives

For this recipe you will need:
250g of stoned black olives
50g of capers rinsed under running water
50g of anchovy fillets
2 cloves of garlic
olive oil
The juice of 1/2 a lemon
Ground black pepper

Simply put all the ingredients apart from the olive oil in a food processor and pulse until you have a fine textured pate, scrape the sides down a couple of times and trickle in enough olive oil, usually around 50 to 100ml to slacken off the mixture.

Notes.
If you are a bread maker like me, having a jar of tapenade in the fridge is always useful when you wish to make a loaf that you can serve at the beginning of a meal to tear and share, simply roll out white dough into a large rectangle, spread with the tapenade, cut it along it's length and twist the two long pieces together before placing in a large cake tin and baking, having given it an hour or so to prove. click here for a similar recipe and more detailed instruction.