We plan to celebrate Labor Day the way we always do. We’ll fire up the grill and eat outside. If you’re doing the same, here are some recipe ideas.  Pick and choose depending on whether you want to build your menu around the traditional burgers and brats — or whether you’re ready to try an all-new lineup this year.

The main course options — rotisserie ribs, grilled halibut and cannellini bean salad — would satisfy meat lovers and vegetarians.  Dessert features chocolate: brownies and madeleines. Both involve baking with extra virgin olive oil instead of butter. You won’t miss the butter. Your heart won’t either.

Appetizer

Crostini with Oven-Dried Tomatoes

This dish packs a ton of flavor. The oven-dried tomatoes that top the crostini are easy to make. They take a few hours but require minimal attention. We made this dish recently and the crostini — topped with the oven-dried tomatoes, chopped olives, garlic paste and fresh herbs — flew off the plate.

or

Fresh Tomato Bruschetta

If you’re squeezed for time and want to capitalize on the abundance of fresh tomatoes, this bruschetta recipe is for you. The bruschetta are topped with fresh basil and tomatoes, some cheese such as feta or gorgonzola, and EVOO. Or dream up your own topping. The variations are endless.

Main Course

Rotisserie Baby Back Ribs

This is one of our most popular recipes. And for good reason: These ribs are fabulous. We’ve cooked them numerous times. You’ll need a rotisserie attachment for your grill. It’s a different take on ribs.  “Gone is the heavy smoke taste so prized by pit bosses in the United States,” Steven Raichlen writes in his book How to Grill (Workman Publishing Co., 2001), where these ribs are featured. “In its stead is the crusty succulence you get when you cook a fatty meat in front of a fire.”

or

Grilled Halibut with Chunky Fennel Vinaigrette

Halibut is one of our favorite seafood dishes. And the fennel vinaigrette topping is an excellent accompaniment. You can also use the vinaigrette on rich, oily fish such as tuna, mackerel, sardines and bluefish.

or

Cannellini Bean Salad with Sun Dried Tomato Vinaigrette

Your vegetarian guests or family members will appreciate this dish. But you don’t have to be a vegetarian to like this bean salad. Our friend Joyce Goldstein, who’s written an entire book on salads entitled Mediterranean Fresh (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), developed this salad for Yale University’s dining service. Students gave it two thumbs up.

Vegetables

Broiled Tomatoes with Goat’s Milk Feta Cheese

Here’s another way to capitalize on the summer tomato crop. This simple dish has garnered excellent reviews from our readers. The chef who created it, Greg Strickland  of Vi near Denver, likes recipes that contain “only a few ingredients.” This dish has only six, including the salt and pepper. It all comes together with a generous drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.

or

Confetti Coleslaw

This coleslaw would pair well with burgers and brats, or the rotisserie ribs. It features a light, flavorful dressing made from EVOO and Dijon-style mustard. Green onions and mint deliver some extra zing.

Dessert

EVOO Brownies

These brownies are as rich and chocolate-laden as any brownie we’ve ever had. And without the stick of butter the typical recipe requires. They’d be a great way to top off a picnic or any meal. And a great way to start a conversation about baking with olive oil. (Wait until afterward to surprise your guests about the secret ingredient.)

or

Chocolate and EVOO Madeleines

If you’ve got access to a madeleine pan, this easy dish is for you. Ordinarily, madeleines are made using butter. The pastry chef who developed these substituted EVOO for the butter and added good quality cocoa powder for the chocolate flavor. She noted “the marriage of dark chocolate, extra virgin olive oil and salt is a miraculous one.” Having eaten these madeleines ourselves, we’d agree.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

Another guest post by my colleague Roger Fillion about his summer trip to southern Italy. Claude S. Weiller

Eating in restaurants is one way to get to know the local cuisine in Italy. We also like to cook the local dishes. And that’s how we ended up making eggplant parmigiana during our vacation in Puglia (pronounced POOL-ya). Eggplant parmesan is one of the great dishes that immigrants from Puglia and elsewhere in southern Italy have brought to the United States.

Puglia is located in “the heel” of Italy’s boot. And we were determined to cook like the Pugliese. We headed out to buy the eggplant, tomatoes, and other ingredients in the nearby town of Alberobello, where it was market day. We also wanted to see the historic town’s unique architecture. Alberobello is filled with more than 1,000 houses topped with cone-shaped tiled roofs. The homes are called trulli.

Miraculously, we didn’t get lost among Alberobello’s narrow streets. Still, it was a challenge to find the market, because we barely spoke Italian. My wife and I and our two kids strolled down one street taking in the trulli … and practically stumbled on the bustling outdoor market at the end of the street.

Dozens of vendors were selling tomatoes, eggplant, mushrooms, melons, and olives. If food wasn’t your thing, you could shop for clothes. Our daughter bought a beautiful purple dress for about $10.

Vendors offered samples of their food. When my wife was looking for a place to put an olive pit, the vendor who gave her the olive put out his hand and happily took the pit.

It was hard choosing from among all the vendors selling ripe San Marzano tomatoes. But I finally picked one stall and bought about two pounds. I also located beautiful eggplants. I just had to buy ground veal and pork. It was difficult, however, not knowing how to say veal and pork in Italian. I didn’t even try to explain that I needed only six ounces. I just took what the woman gave me.

Meat, by the way, isn’t a big part of Puglia’s cuisine, which includes vegetables, legumes, seafood and lots of extra virgin olive oil. But meat is eaten on special occasions. We were on vacation. And this particular eggplant parmesan recipe called for little meatballs.

It comes from a great book we’d brought: Puglia: A Culinary Memoir (Oronzo Editions, 2008), by Maria Pignatelli Ferrante.

Back at our rental house, I dredged slices of eggplant in flour, dipped them in egg, and fried them in extra virgin olive oil.  I puréed the tomatoes in a blender and cooked the sauce for about 10 minutes until it thickened slightly. I made the meatballs, pictured here, and fried them in more EVOO.

Assembling the dish was easy, as pictured above. I spread sauce on the bottom of a baking dish. I added layers of eggplant, mozzarella, meatballs, and freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. I repeated the layering a couple of times, and put the dish in the oven.

We were so eager to try the eggplant parmesan we forgot to take a photo of the finished dish. It was excellent. The leftovers made for an exceptional lunch the following day.

Buon appetito,

Roger Fillion
California Olive Ranch

We’ve been test driving a simple method to cook seafood by poaching it in extra virgin olive oil. It produces phenomenal results. The halibut we poached was moist. It had a rich, yet delicate, flavor. Our nine-year-old recipe tester declared: “Good fish!” An added bonus: You can reuse the EVOO.

Culinary pros are big fans of poaching in olive oil. Seafood guru Dory Ford says fish is perfect for poaching in a high-quality extra virgin olive oil. “Fish is mild and it’s fairly neutral in its flavor. So it’s going to take on the flavor characteristics of the olive oil,” says Ford, the chef-owner of Aqua Terra Culinary, a Pebble Beach, Calif., firm that handles catering, event planning, and menu consulting.

New York Times food writer Mark Bittman writes that “dense, white-fleshed fish like halibut and monkfish “come with a built-in difficulty: They must be cooked through to be tender, but such thorough cooking tends to make them dry. Among the techniques that solve this problem is one that is not used as often as it might be: poaching in olive oil.”

We tried Bittman’s recipe for poaching halibut. We didn’t have access to halibut steaks, as he suggests, so we used fillets. We used two cups of our California Everyday EVOO. Following the recipe, we carefully heated the oil in a deep skillet until it reached 200 degrees Fahrenheit. We used an instant read thermometer to keep tabs on the temperature.

We then slid our halibut fillets into the EVOO along with some root vegetables for added flavor: carrots, shallots and garlic. Use as many vegetables as the pan will hold.

Using our thermometer, we kept a careful eye on the temperature to ensure it stayed within a 180-200 degree F. band. One thing chefs tell us: Be patient and avoid pushing up the temperature to speed the poaching process.

“You lose some of that silky texture and (the fish) become firmer,” says Gregory Strickland, an executive chef for Vi, the upscale senior living center chain formerly known as Classic Residence by Hyatt. Strickland heads the kitchen at the Vi in Highlands Ranch, Colo.

After about 15 minutes we carefully flipped our halibut and continued poaching until the fish and vegetables were tender enough to be pierced through with the end of a thin-bladed knife, about 25 minutes.

The halibut, pictured above, was among the most succulent fish dishes we’ve ever had. The root vegetables that accompanied the fish in the pan also were delicious.

To save your EVOO for future use, chefs recommends carefully pouring the cooled oil back into a container such as a jar or bottle, while leaving any sediment or juices in the pan. We strained the oil through a fine-mesh strainer. Keep the oil in the refrigerator. “It extends its life and keeps it fresh,” says Ford, a leader in the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program which promotes the use of sustainable seafood.

We used our leftover EVOO to poach Coho salmon, which also was excellent.

What other seafood is good for poaching? Ford also recommends lobster, California Albacore tuna, and Pacific white sea bass. If you want to be more adventurous, Bittman recommends octopus.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

Joyce Goldstein doesn’t mince words, particularly when it comes to Mediterranean cuisine. Take the time culinary legend Julia Child questioned Joyce’s embrace of the Mediterranean diet. “She was not impressed with it because it had such small portions of meat and not much dairy,” recalled Joyce. “I told her my father died at 47 of a heart attack and I was not blessed with her metabolism and gene pool to survive all that saturated fat!”

Photo: www.andrebaranowskiphoto.com

Joyce Goldstein has embraced the Mediterranean diet with a bear hug. A San Francisco chef, Joyce operated the pioneering Mediterranean restaurant Square One for a dozen years from 1984 to 1996. She garnered numerous accolades and awards.   Today, at 75, Joyce remains a strong proponent of Mediterranean cuisine while continuing to teach, consult and churn out cookbooks.

Her book Mediterranean Fresh (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), focuses on salads from the region. One dish that caught our eye is a beautiful couscous salad with toasted almonds, raisins, and saffron-infused onions.

Couscous is a staple grain product throughout North Africa. Couscous salad, however, is not a traditional dish from the region. “But this is a salad with Moroccan flavors and Americans love it,” Joyce told us.

The dish can be assembled quickly. The raisins are “plumped” for a short period in hot water. Meanwhile, a quarter teaspoon of saffron is allowed to steep in hot water for 15 minutes. The saffron infusion and some orange zest are later added to onions sautéed in extra virgin olive oil.

The couscous itself takes very little time to prepare. Joyce boils a cup of water along with a cup of fresh orange juice, cinnamon, ginger, cumin and salt. The boiling water is poured over the couscous and the pan is then covered tightly with foil. It takes only about 10 minutes before the couscous is ready to be fluffed with a fork.

The couscous is tossed with the rains, onions, slivered almonds and a citrus dressing made using fresh lemon juice and extra virgin olive oil.

Joyce recommends serving this couscous mounded on a platter and surrounded by slices of fresh fruit and mint leaves or watercress — or, as is, in a salad bowl.

“It’s excellent with fresh fruit additions like sliced peaches, apricots, melon, etc.,” said Joyce, who suggests using a delicate EVOO such as our Arbequina to make the dressing. “It’s seasonal for the next few months with all of the fruit on hand.”

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

If you’re lucky to venture off the beaten track on Crete you can still see women on hillsides collecting wild greens for a family meal. The greens, or horta, are a staple of Crete’s healthful bounty and help explain why the Greek island is considered a showcase for the Mediterranean diet.

“It’s no accident that some of the earliest studies of that diet were done in Crete back in the 1960s, when a group of American scientists came here to investigate the relationship between diet and disease,” Mediterranean food guru Nancy Harmon Jenkins writes in the latest issue of Saveur.

“It was a population that lived, it seemed, on olive oil, lots and lots of olive oil, not just drizzled but downright inundating salads, greens, and other foods. And that remains the case today.”

The dish featured here shows how greens are prepared on the island of Crete. Paula Wolfert, another Mediterranean food guru, created this dish, which comes to us via the food think tank Oldways.

The mix of greens in this dish — including beet greens, baby spinach, Swiss chard, miner’s lettuce, pea shoots, and mache — comes close to the complex flavors of the bitter greens found on hillsides in Crete.

The dish also includes another staple of Greek cuisine: black-eyed peas. In this case, you reconstitute dried blacked-eyed peas through water and some easy cooking.

To begin, chopped onions, scallions and fennel are sautéed in extra virgin olive oil until soft. The greens are added to the saucepan along with cilantro, tomatoes, fennel seed and salt and pepper and cooked for 10 minutes.

The reconstituted black-eyed peas are added and the dish is then simmered for 10 minutes or so. Adjust the seasoning, if need be.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

A guest post by my colleague Roger Fillion about his summer trip to Italy. It meshes well with our focus this month on Mediterranean cuisine  in our eNewsletter and blogs. Claude S. Weiller

Magical things can happen in southern Italy. Our 14-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son actually liked the same pasta: spaghetti with white clam sauce. Back in the states, our daughter likes mainly pesto and our son favors tomato sauces.

My wife and our two kids spent about two weeks in Puglia ( pronounced POOL-ya).  If you see a boot-shaped country when you look at Italy on the map, you’ll find this region in the “heel” area. (It’s sometimes called Apulia in English.)

Puglia is an arid, beautiful place where we encountered hardly any Americans. There aren’t a lot of travel books on Puglia, very few people speak English, and the road signs aren’t much help. Consequently, we got lost practically every time we ventured out in the car.  Once we became so lost an off-duty policeman took pity on us and led us in his car to a winery we were trying to visit.

To get a feel for the people and the cuisine we rented a house outside a small town, Ceglie Messapica, about 15 miles west of the Adriatic Sea. We shopped at outdoor fruit and vegetable markets, and bought fresh cheese and eggs from neighboring farmers.

Local cooks work wonders with vegetables, dried beans and seafood.  The healthful, simple cuisine is cooked in extra virgin olive oil.

Olive trees are everywhere, and a “drizzle” doesn’t begin to describe how the people here use EVOO. “In Puglia we’ve got it on tap. We’re lucky,” one local resident told us.

We arrived in Puglia on the tail end of a stormy week of weather. Rough waters had made it impossible for local fisherman to go out in their boats. The local fishmonger could only shake his head when I asked if he had clams, or vongole.

On our fourth day, however, I knew we’d be having a clam dinner. The storms had passed. And the fishmonger had a broad smile when he saw me. He nodded his head toward the netted bags of small, gorgeous clams on display.

To help us with the local cooking, my wife bought a great book before we left — Puglia: A Culinary Memoir (Oronzo Editions, 2008), by Maria Pignatelli Ferrante. The book is loaded with recipes and information about the foods of the region.

The spaghetti with white clam sauce recipe in the book is simple. The clams are cooked in half a cup of extra virgin olive oil. The liquid they release is the basis for the sauce. We tossed the opened clams, their liquid, and the pasta together with flat-leaf parsley. That was it.

The tiny clams in their shells made for an impressive display. And, to top it off, our kids happily devoured it.

Buon appetito,

Roger Fillion
California Olive Ranch

The news media was abuzz with stories this week about how the nation’s waistline keeps expanding. “Americans are continuing to get fatter and fatter, with obesity rates reaching 30 percent or more in nine states last year, as opposed to only three states in 2007,” the New York Times reported.  The stories brought to mind advice I’ve been hearing at recent health and culinary conferences.

One conference looked at how doctors must give their patients more information about nutritious foods that taste good. The foods include fruit, vegetables, legumes, nuts, healthy proteins such as seafood, and plant-based oils including olive oil.

“It’s not rocket science. It’s not brain surgery,” said David Eisenberg, an accomplished cook and director of the Osher Research Center at Harvard Medical School, which co-sponsored the conference with the Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone campus in the Napa Valley.

The Mediterranean diet was trumpeted as a healthy eating regimen at this conference and another I attended last month in northern California. (You can find a variety of delicious Mediterranean recipes – like spaghetti with white clam sauce and a Lebanese variation of tabbouleh called fattoush – in our August eNewsletter.)

Dr. Eisenberg, meanwhile, ticked off a list of healthy eating tips worth sharing in light of this week’s obesity news:

1. Eat more fruits, vegetables and nuts in place of processed carbohydrates.
2. Choose healthier carbohydrates – whole grains and foods with lower glycemic loads.
3. Choose healthier proteins – emphasize fish, poultry, tofu, nuts and legumes.
4. Eliminate trans fat, reduce saturated fats and replace these with healthier, plant-based fats and oils.
5. Imagine your “ideal plate” – ¼ protein; ¼ healthier carb; ½ vegetables.
6. Also consider the “dessert flip” with more fruit and smaller portions of indulgent desserts.
7. Portion control is king – “It’s the calories stupid.”
8. Look for opportunities to reduce salt. Season with herbs and spices first.
9. In place of sugar sweetened beverages, emphasize water, tea and coffee.
10. Enjoy wine/alcohol but not too much!
11. Consider the environmental impact of the foods we buy and eat.

It’s all good advice. The experts admit, however, they must hone their message to have a wider impact.

“We need to focus on how to make plant foods as sexy as double cheeseburgers,” said Greg Drescher, executive director of strategic initiatives at the CIA’s Greystone campus, speaking to a recent conference in Silicon Valley that brought together college and university food service chefs and nutritonists.

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

Sometimes it’s the simple recipes that pack lots of flavor. John Ash’s crostini with oven-dried tomatoes fall into that category. We made the dish over the weekend. The crostini — topped with the oven-dried tomatoes, chopped olives, garlic paste and fresh herbs — flew off the plate … though we did manage to squeeze a few photos in beforehand.

The concentrated flavor of the oven-dried tomatoes paired beautifully with the brininess of the olives. John, a noted California chef and culinary instructor, says oven-drying is a great way to vastly improve the “pretty awful” tomatoes you often find in the supermarket.

“It’s a very simple technique and I will usually do three to five pounds at a time and then store them in the refrigerator for use in salads, with pasta, rice or just about anything that tomatoes are called for,” says John.

The tomatoes were a breeze to prepare. We halved some Roma tomatoes lengthwise and drizzled them and some unpeeled garlic cloves with our Everyday California EVOO. After adding some salt and freshly ground pepper we placed the tomatoes and garlic in a 275 degree oven for a few hours. The tomatoes came out beautifully, although we probably could have dried them even a tad longer.

“They idea is they become meltingly soft, almost like a marmalade,” John told us afterward. Regardless, they tasted delicious.

We had made sourdough baguettes earlier in the day, and so we brushed a few slices of one with more EVOO and grilled the bread over a moderately hot fire. John suggests putting the slices under the broiler or toasting them in a 375 degree oven.

Assembling the crostini was easy. We squeezed the roasted garlic from their skins and mashed them with a mortar and pestle. We spread that on the grilled bread, added some chopped olives, and topped each with a roasted tomato or two, chopped basil and mint, and more EVOO.

The dish makes for a great hors d’oeuvre. We enjoyed our crostini with a glass of Campari. They’d also make for a great snack or lunch dish.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

I usually think of tomatoes and peaches separately from a cooking standpoint—gazpacho soup, say, or a piping hot peach pie. But these two stars of the summer farmer’s market have a few things in common. They’re both fruit, though in the kitchen we typically think of tomatoes as a vegetable. They each taste delicious and are loaded with good juices. And they’re currently at their seasonal peak. Which begs the question: What about a culinary marriage?

“Go ahead and turn them into a salad,” says chef and food writer Susie Middleton in her excellent cookbook Fast, Fresh & Green (Chronicle Books, 2010). “They’re in season together, and they taste great together, with the sweetness of the peach balancing the acidity of the tomato.”

Middleton has created a colorful and flavorful summer salad, relying on ripe heirloom tomatoes, peaches, and fresh herbs. Why the name, “gazpacho salad”?

“You can roughly purée any leftovers in a blender, chill it, and you’ve got a delicious gazpacho,” writes Middleton in Fast, Fresh & Green, where this recipe appears. She recommends making this salad only when tomatoes and peaches are in season.

No cooking required for this dish. The tomatoes are stemmed, cored, and cut into pieces. The peaches are peeled, cut into wedges, and placed in a bowl along with the tomatoes and slices of red onion.

Middleton makes a dressing using extra virgin olive oil, orange juice, balsamic vinegar, soy sauce, lemon zest, and salt.

Add the dressing as well as fresh mint and basil leaves. Gently toss the salad. And you’re ready to go.

“If you can, try not to toss the salad until a few minutes before serving—while the flavor improves with sitting, the looks and texture do not,” says Middleton.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch

Maybe you’re lucky and have a big patch of basil growing in your backyard plot. Even if you don’t have fresh basil at your fingertips, here’s a recipe that’s worth a trip to your local farmers’ market or grocery store. Our friend John Ash has taken traditional basil pesto and created a particularly flavorful version by using pistachios instead of pine nuts. We tossed John’s pistachio basil pesto with fresh vermicelli pasta and quickly devoured it for dinner, along with a simple green salad and a good dry white wine.

John, a renowned California chef and culinary instructor, packs in the flavor by using three cups of basil instead of the two cups we ordinarily use to make pesto.

John also takes steps to prevent the basil from darkening, as it often can when you make pesto at home. John boils the basil very briefly and then plunges the leaves in ice water to set their bright green color.

We made this dish using our Miller’s Blend extra virgin olive oil. We wanted a little bit of pungency. Of course, any of our olive oils would be fine. We also used raw, unsalted pistachios to have more control over how much salt would go in the pesto.

And because the recipe calls for toasting the pistachios, we figured raw pistachios would be better than roasted ones.

Otherwise, this recipe is very much like a traditional pesto recipe. The basil and toasted pistachios are puréed in a food processor or blender along with garlic and a third of a cup of extra virgin olive oil. The pesto is transferred to a bowl where you add the cheese and more EVOO if you want a thinner sauce. Adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper.

We made a couple of tweaks to John’s recipe. We added a tablespoon or so of hot pasta water to the pesto to melt the cheese. We also skewered the garlic cloves and blanched them in boiling water for about 45 seconds to cut the garlic’s raw sting. And we topped our pasta with some more freshly grated cheese — in this case Parmesan.

This pesto has an appealingly spicy flavor. You could also spread it on grilled chicken breasts and fish such as salmon. Use it as a topping on a pizza. Or add a dollop to a bowl of soup.

And if you’re looking for yet another take on pesto or pistachios, have a look at food writer Mark Bittman’s asparagus pesto or a delicious EVOO ice cream made with pistachios.

Bon appétit,

Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch