I needed something different on my sandwich for lunch, so I started to search around the fridge for some items that could be re-purposed for a sandwich. And for some reason yesterday my mind started to wander into thinking about charcuterie and sous vide (don’t ask.) When I started to think about this jar of olives in my fridge. It might have had something to due with my last two uses of olives being for a bloody mary and on a vegetarian pizza, that I really wanted to jazz up how I use olives. So digging into my memory banks, I started to think about what kind of sandwiches have olives inside. And the only thing that i could think of was a po’boy. Since I really didn’t want to make a po’boy, nor did I even have all the ingredients for a po’boy, I drifted into making a tapenade instead.

I mean really, there isn’t too much to making a tapenade. So after reviewing two Martha Stewart recipes for tapenade, here is the version that I came up with on the fly. With the only similarity to the Martha recipes being Olives and olive oil, since all the other items are things that you normally won’t see in a tepenade:

• Handful of cured olives stuffed with pimento (9 olives were used)
• Couple of shelled pistachios (8 nuts were used)
• 1 tsp lemon juice (see side notes)
• 1 tsp Parmesan cheese
• 1 TB Olive Oil
• couple of cracks of tellicherry black pepper

Side Notes:

• Just a quick taste of the mix, and this tapenade didn’t need the lemon juice since it was just acid overkill from the brininess of the olives. If anything it needed a little bit of sweetness maybe from honey to balance out the sour of the olives. I guess something to try out next time. But I did like the crunch that the chopped pistachios added to the tapenade, it was a little something unexpected from a dish that is usually considered very soft on the teeth. But what can I say, I like to mix it up.
• Yes I can hear the howling about this not being a tapenade in the truest sense of the term, since I didn’t use capers, black olives and anchovies. But since I didn’t have any of those items, I improvised with what I had on hand in the house.