Creative Fruits

My tree’s contribution to the olive-making project is officially complete. Now it’s up to me. Me and the brine. Not much there to go wrong, right?

Ten years ago was the last time I got the itch to take up a new hobby, something that created something, but did not entail too much creativity. I can’t act, sing, draw or play a musical instrument. I don’t do pottery, photography or quilting. (I can barely sew a button. Ask my mother.) Though I can pull together a decent meal and bake birthday cakes to please five-year-olds, I can’t make elaborate desserts that belong on magazine covers. So I skeptically skimmed through the catalogue of the local adult education program. Passing over the portrait painting and creative writing, I settled on soap-making.

Now we are going back awhile, and this is not a craft that I kept up for very long, so I admit I have to cheat to remind myself the details of what’s involved. The essential steps of soap-making are combining a lye solution with oils of your choice (such as olive, palm, coconut, etc.) or (in my case) according to recipes, at carefully monitored temperatures. The next step entails a great deal of stirring, after which you may add essential oils for scent, spices for color (paprika and turmeric work well), and fillers for texture, such as dried flower pieces or oatmeal. Then you pour the concoction into non-reactive plastic molds – I used to save up the personal-sized applesauce snacks for a nice round soap – and store the liquid-cum-soap for up to six weeks to allow the lye, a dangerous substance, to chemically react with the oils. At the end, with any luck, you get a fragrant homemade gift to send to family and friends.

I didn’t realize it at first, but soap-making and olive-curing have a great deal in common. A chemical process takes place over the course of weeks in an out-of-the-way place, at home. (I saponified the soaps in the back of my closet in my tiny Boston apartment away from my hyperactive cat. The olives are curing in my dark, lightly-trafficked guest room in Modi’in, safe from my active kids.) Dangerous (lye) or inedible (raw olives) substances transform into a delectable, appealing product. Natural ingredients add fragrance and flavor. Used applesauce containers (nearly) gain a new lease on life. And, surprisingly, some olive-curing recipes even call for lye. (I steered clear of those.)

Both are off-the-beaten path hobbies, which don’t require great natural talent, but with some effort, practice, good conditions, and a little luck, produce a respectable product which people enjoy. And both, to varying degrees, derive from the olive tree.

A decade ago, the mothering project supplanted the soap-making project. I abandoned soap-making when I became pregnant with my first child, fearful that the lye presented a potential risk to my unborn baby.

Some nine months and nine years later, soap-making did not cross my mind when I hurried home from the grocery store to get to work on my freshly picked olives. By the time my first-born, now a fourth-grader, came home from school, I had cut slices into a good chunk of the olives, and placed them into the waiting jars.

For the first time, my son took a serious interest in the olive project. His interest, it turns out, was monetary. He hoped to set up shop down the street, selling olives to feed his soccer cards addiction. Though I disabused him of that notion, he nevertheless contentedly settled down next to me. Side by side, we prepped the olives for the next stage.