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THE HARVEST
 
NOVEMBER 2012
EVOO with Fresh Herbs
IN THIS ISSUE
LIMITED RESERVE
Be among the first notified about the availability of our Limited Reserve extra virgin olive oil - and get free shipping! Limited Reserve is our freshest oil, and is available only during the fall harvest.
 
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WHAT'S HAPPENING AT THE RANCH
YouTube 
Visit our YouTube page and and see what keeps our ranchers and millers busy.

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FACES AT THE RANCH
COR office staff get a primer on olive trees from Adam Englehardt

Our Office Team

Our office staff gets a primer on olive trees from rancher Adam Englehardt. The staff visited our Artois mill and spoke with our ranchers and millers about olive trees and making oil. 
FAN PHOTO OF THE MONTH


Send Us Your Photos!

Congratulations to Mary Janssen, the newest winner of our Fan Photo of the Month contest. Mary shared this photo of her favorite dish: our oil, kale, onion and sea salt. Mary, as a result, has  won some olive oil. You can win this month's contest by sending us a photo showing how you use our oil. Put "Fan Photo" in the subject line and send it to the email address below, or post it on our Facebook page

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NEW COOKBOOK
Canal House Cooks Every Day

Order Your Copy Today

The duo behind the highly touted Canal House Cooking series have just published a new book: Canal House Cooks Every Day (Andrews-McMeel Publishing, 2012). It features nearly 250 seasonal recipes and more than 130 lush photographs and illustrations.

 Click here to order
IT'S OLIVE HARVEST TIME!
Fresh extra virgin olive oil
The fall harvest is our busiest time.

A couple of weeks ago, our harvest teams entered our olive groves and began picking the ripe, oil-rich olives. The crews rush those olives, by truck, to our northern California mill to ensure they're as fresh as possible. Our milling team then crushes the olives into extra virgin olive oil. It's a round-the-clock job. By the time harvest is over later this month, our teams will have crushed hundreds of truckloads of olive into oil.

Harvest also is a special time for us. It's when we begin bottling our Limited Reserve extra virgin olive oil. Limited, as we call it, is the freshest oil we make. It goes straight into the bottle, without spending any time in a tank where fruit particles are allowed to settle and be removed. We bottle Limited just once a year - so it's availability is limited.

Like fall, this oil is fleeting. Its eight-month shelf life is less than half that of our other oils, because the leftover fruit particles in these bottles ultimately ferment. When you put a spoonful of Limited Reserve in your mouth, you taste a "burst" of fresh olive fruitiness, followed by a pleasant peppery tickle in your throat.

In our kitchen, we use Limited in countless ways. We drizzle it over roasted Brussels sprouts and root vegetables. We use it to dip good, crusty bread. We add it to pur�ed carrots. We use it to make garlickly pasta sauce that showcases this very special oil. Basically, we let our culinary imagination run wild.

To help you celebrate the harvest, we've assembled recipes using seasonally available fruits and vegetables. We also feature a Q&A with two famous women who love good extra virgin olive oil, and are well known for cooking with seasonal ingredients as well as taking stunning food photos: Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton, the award-winning dream team behind the Canal House Cooking series. Their advice to home cooks: "Buy well-locally and seasonally-and cook simply!"

It's all about making the best with what Mother Nature has provided.
Our Favorite Harvest Recipes
Chicken Roasted Over Potatoes and Lemon
Chicken Roasted Over Potatoes and Lemon The "apartment-size stoves" that Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton use in their test kitchen at Canal House lack a rotisserie. "So when we want to 'rotisserie' a chicken, we put the bird directly on the oven rack and slide a pan of sliced crusty bread, root vegetables, or potatoes and lemons onto the rack below to catch the flavorful juices," they write in their new book,  Canal House Cooks Every Day (Andrews-McMeel Publishing, 2012). The chicken is split and lies flat, like an open book, and makes for easier carving and faster cooking. Roast the potatoes and lemon with our Everyday Fresh Oil.   

 Click here to see the recipe
Roasted Carrot Soup
Mom's Summer Tomato Salad This soup, from our friends at Food52.com, gets its special flavor through the use of broiled carrots. Before they're added to the broth, the carrots are broiled until they brown and soften. The soup gets additional flavor by simmering some ginger root and a thyme sprig in the broth before the carrots and onions are added. Use our Everyday Fresh oil to prepare the soup - and give each bowl a drizzle or our robust Miller's Blend or Limited Reserve oils.    

 Click here to see the recipe
Stuffed Portobello with Melting Taleggio
Mom's Summer Tomato Salad Famed London chef Yotam Ottolenghi uses this mushroom dish to showcase Taleggio cheese, a soft cow's milk variety from  northern Italy. "It has the strong aroma of a mature cheese and melts evenly and smoothly," he writes in his cookbook Plenty (Chronicle Books, 2011), where this recipe appears. Our Everyday Fresh oil would be good for preparing this dish. Give the mushrooms a finishing drizzle of our fruity Arbequina.   

 Click here to see the recipe
Fennel-Roasted Vegetables
Michael Chiarello Fennel-Roasted Vegetables Napa Valley chef Michael Chiarello declares this "one of my all-time favorite vegetable dishes." You can pick and choose your veggies: fennel, potatoes, Brussels sprouts, mushrooms, etc. They're first pan-roasted on the stove before going in the oven with some crushed fennel seed. Our Everyday Fresh oil would be good for roasting the veggies. The recipe is in Michael Chiarello's Casual Cooking  (Chronicle Books, 2012). For added flavor,  drizzle the finished veggies with our robust Limited Reserve.

 Click here to see the recipe
Belgian Endive Salad with Pears, Gorgonzola, and Pecans
Arugula Salad with Watermelon and Feta Pears are our favorite fall fruit. Here they're paired with endive, crumbled Gorgonzola (or your favorite blue cheese), and chopped pecans. The salad is dressed with a simple vinaigrette. Our fruity Arbequina oil would be a good choice for making the dressing and would help showcase the flavors in this dish. The recipe appears in Seriously Simple (Chronicle Books, 2002), by Diane Rossen Worthington. 

Click here to see the recipe
Potato Torte Stuffed with Pancetta
Chiarello Potato Torte Napa Valley chef Michael Chiarello used to live in Miami, where he was served a version of this dish at a famous crab restaurant. "The potatoes, which were baked first and then turned into a cake, were amazing," he writes in At Home with Michael Chiarello (Chronicle Books, 2005), where the recipe appears. The torte can be made hours ahead of time and reheated. Give this hearty dish a finishing  drizzle of our our robust Miller's Blend or Arbosana oils.

 Click here to see the recipe
The Women of Canal House Cooking
Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton
Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton
Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton
Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton are a culinary dream team. The duo were among the heavyweights that created Saveur magazine. They're famous for their wonderfully simple, seasonal recipes and groundbreaking, realistic food photography. In 2006, Hirsheimer and Hamilton launched their own culinary publishing powerhouse that's definitely worth an online visit: Canal House Cooking, where you'll find boatloads of great recipes and drop-dead gorgeous photographs.

The Canal House moniker reflects the fact that Hersheimer and Hamilton's office - a test kitchen as well as photo and design studio - is perched along the Delaware Canal towpath, in New Jersey . There, they produce a beautiful online food magazine plus a steady stream of highly regarded cookbooks: the Canal House Cooking series of books.

"I get goosebumps every time I receive a new seasonal Canal House cookbook," Mario Batali, the celebrity chef, gushes. Speaking of which ... the Canal House duo have just published a gorgeous new book: Canal House Cooks Every Day (Andrews-McMeel Publishing, 2012). It offers a year of seasonal recipes for the home cook.

What's your earliest food memory?


CH: Believe it or not, one of my first food memories is artichoke vinaigrette. The artichoke was so much fun to eat - pulling the flesh from the leaves with your bottom teeth. And I loved to dip the leaves into mustardy vinaigrette. Guess I have always loved the flavor of good olive oil.

MH: I remember picking and eating strawberries in my Mother's garden. They never have tasted sweeter.

How do you come up with ideas for new dishes?

CH/MH: We call ourselves "salt & pepper" cooks, so we really rely on cooking the best we can find in a sensitive, simple way. We count on good flaky sea salt, freshly ground Tellicherry pepper, a high fat butter, and always a very good extra-virgin olive oil.
We are always moved and inspired by the ingredients. If we have beautiful big ripe tomatoes we might make something classic, like an authentic gazpacho, but we might veer off and make a modern version of a Caprese salad with sliced tomatoes, tiny cubes of smoked fresh mozzarella, little croutons, a scattering of basil leaves and a good drizzle of Arbosana extra-virgin olive oil.

How do you like to use California Olive Ranch extra virgin olive oil in your cooking?

CH/MH: To be honest we were thrilled to find California Olive Ranch olive oil at our local grocery store. Before that we would mail order some expensive Italian olive oils to use to finish dishes and make dressings for salads. It cost us an arm and a leg!  And we would buy any recent harvest Italian all-purpose olive oil to cook with - but it was a bit of a guessing game to know if the oil would be any good. Now we cook with COR's Everyday Fresh oil and we finish dishes with Arbequina or Miller's Blend. We pull out the Limited Reserve for something very special.

What's your best piece of advice for home cooks?

CH/MH: Buy well-locally and seasonally - and cook simply!

What do you like to cook at home?

CH/MH:  We are home cooks and we do cook every day for ourselves and for our families. Right now we are for duck (duck with potatoes and caraway, duck confit, duck apples and onions, duck Sarladaise, duck soup ...), shell beans (fresh cranberry beans in umido), apple tarts, and pumpkin everything. We are always turned on by what is in the markets.

What do you like to eat when you're too tired to cook?

CH/MH: We are never too tired to cook! But it might be a nice piece of cheese with some good toasted bread rubbed with garlic and drizzled with the best olive oil.

Do you follow recipes, or wing it?

CH/MH: Since we write recipes for our Canal House Cooking series we have to test everything. We weigh, measure, and time everything as we go to be sure that our readers have all the right directions to succeed and make something delicious. But when we are just cooking for ourselves we sometimes follow recipes and sometimes we wing it! It is a bit hard for us to diligently follow a recipe. We kind of know where we are going, so how we get there doesn't really matter.