O2O returns
Last year Olives to Oil manager Merrin Layden was frantically revising her participant predictions for the CERES annual olive picking and pressing festival with every passing hour.
If you came and dropped your olives at the Fair Food warehouse you would remember long lines of people with bags and buckets stretching out the door and a sea of olives covering every available piece of floor space.
On the back of a bumper local olive crop and a kind of word-of-mouth tipping point, more than 2000 people, including some from as far away as Phillip Island and the Goldfields, took part in the festival.
Our regular olive press at Barfold Olives was overwhelmed before Cockatoo Grove Olive Oil and Kyneton Olives came to the rescue pressing tons of surplus olives.
Over 2500 litres of olive oil was returned to the kitchens of suburban olive pickers and the eclectic oil won its third medal at the Adelaide Show.
Merrin Layden suspected 2023 might be big but the 26 ton harvest blew the previous 6 ton harvest record so far out of the water that she had to go back to the drawing board for 2024’s festival.
For this year’s Olives to Oil you still pick your, your neighbour’s or your street’s olives and drop them off for pressing.
The big difference is you’ll need to book yourself a ticket even if you have only a few kilos to drop off.
For up to 20kg of olives pressing is free but if you have lots of olives we ask people to help out with the processing costs.
For 20-40kg olives it’s $10, for 40-60kg $20 and for 60-100kg its $50 – pretty good value when you get 1 litre of extra virgin olive oil for every 10kgs of olives.
Olives to Oil is available for people living in Yarra, Merri-bek, Darebin, Hobsons Bay, Maribyrnong, Brimbank and Wyndham councils.
If you don’t live in one of these LGA’s, Merrin’s encouraging people who want Olives to Oil in their areas to ask local councillors to join in – she’s even created an email template to make it super easy.
And if you’d like to volunteer on one of Melbourne’s most joyous days, get in touch with olivestooil@ceres.org.au – you also get to take home a bottle of O2O oil.
Olives to Oil 2024
Sun 5th and 19th May at CERES Brunswick East
Sun 26th May at Bennet St Car Park, Sunshine
Sun 2nd June, Werribee, location TBC
Here’s the link for more info
Food is life
There are some seriously great guest teachers dropping in to take weekend workshops at CERES; Kelly Michelakis is no exception – people say over and over how warm, patient, skilled, organised and fun she is.
Kelly has made her family’s food her life; teaching Greek cooking classes, walking food tours in Melbourne and hosting culinary travel groups in Crete.
A regular on cooking shows in Australia and Greece, Kelly shares her traditional Greek and Cretan food drawing on family recipes from melitzanosalata dip, Greek salads, filo dishes, healthy vegetarian mains all the way to loukoumades – little honey puff donuts.
Working with simple, seasonal ingredients and drawing on the ten ground rules of the Mediterranean diet, Kelly always ends her classes with a meal together as well as new skills, recipes and leftovers to take home.
Kelly is cooking at CERES on the April 27th – you can find out more about her class here and if you use the code GREEK$10OFF you’ll get $10 off.
Have a great week
Chris
