As part of HuffPost's “Reclaim” project, HuffPost Taste will focus the entire month of July on simple ways you can reduce food waste in your own home.
We know that really good olive oil is expensive -- too expensive. But we also know that a nice olive oil can elevate any of our homemade meals to restaurant status. Its naturally fruity flavor adds a richness to dishes with just a drizzle of the good stuff. If you don't want to throw down a lot of cash, there's a hack to making cheap olive oil taste better: olive pits.
Adding olive pits to your jar of olive oil will infuse the oil with a more olive-y flavor. We're not saying this will make a bad jar of olive oil taste amazing, but it will add more flavor to a decent jar of oil. Plus, it gets you a little extra mileage out of the olives you bought at the store -- and makes use out of a bound-for-the-trash kitchen scrap. Less food wasted, less money wasted and better tasting olive oil.
We learned this trick from Bon Appetit and it is a keeper. Making infused oils at home isn't anything new, but infusing that oil with olives is pretty genius. However, once you add olive pits to your olive oil the shelf life of the oil will be reduced. We suggest doing this in small batches -- infuse only what you'll use in one week's time -- and store it in the fridge, just to be safe.