Pesto?

[Provost Harrison]

You screwed up with your options. Now I demand you eat a whole jar of banana pesto

[Kitschum]

Here you go, enough bananas to last you at least a year.

Now I expect no more mention of bananas, plantains or any other yellow dildoid fruits.

[MRT144]

Basil and good olive oil are also not cheap.

You can afford it.

[KrazyHorse]

That's true, but it's still killer to pay somebody to fly it in from Italy for me on a private jet.

[Drake Tungsten]

Italian olive oil is overrated. I prefer Greek or Tunisian oil; all the backbreaking labor by poorly-educated Mediterranean subhumans really does make it taste better.

[-Jrabbit]

You can grow basil in a flower pot. Not difficult to keep, either.

[Dinner]

Italian olive oil is overrated. I prefer Greek or Tunisian oil; all the backbreaking labor by poorly-educated Mediterranean subhumans really does make it taste better.

First, I like the joke but Tunisian oil (Morocco produces the most in Africa) is all pretty low quality stuff. There's a lot of fake olive oil (cheaper oil bottled and passed off as olive oil), second press oil (the stuff which can't be labeled as "extra virgin" or even "virgin"), or worse 3rd press which has so little oil left they have to heat the whole thing to get anything out of it thus totally ruining the flavor. With all these fake and low quality olive oils out there why risk buying something that's not from a highly regulated 1st world country?

[Drake Tungsten]

Morocco produces the most in Africa

No, they don't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_oil

I'm continually amazed by your ability to be wrong about any subject you choose to display your knowledge of...

edit:

An article by Tom Mueller in the August 13, 2007 issue of the The New Yorker alleges that regulation, particularly in Italy, is extremely lax and corrupt. Mueller states that major Italian shippers routinely adulterate olive oil and that only about 40% of olive oil sold as "extra virgin" actually meets the specification. In some cases, colza oil with added color and flavor has been labeled and sold as olive oil.

What were you saying about highly regulated 1st world countries?

edit 2: There's also no such thing as a "second press", you moron. The olives are pressed once (which produces extra-virgin and virgin oil) and then the remaining oil is extracted with chemical solvents (for pure or pomace oil).

[Dinner]

Meh, I was wrong about Morocco but we all know you had to look it up because there is no way you knew that on your own.

[Drake Tungsten]

If it makes you feel better about your own ignorance, you can pretend that I don't actually know more than you.

[Dinner]

There is no pretending involved.

Seriously, google-fu does not make you smart it just makes you dependent on search engines.

[Drake Tungsten]

You picked the wrong time to pretend to know something about North Africa, as I've recently been on a Maghrebi cooking kick. This naturally led me to check out the "tajine" Wikipedia page a couple days ago...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tajine

... which has a link to an article about a family in the Medjerda Valley of Tunisia who produce world-class olive oil.

http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/divine-secrets-of-the-mahjoub-sisterhood

This, of course, led me to read a bit about the Tunisian olive oil industry and left me well-equipped to both make a joke about Tunisian olive oil and completely pwn you when you tried to denigrate the olive oil industry of this fine country.

[Dinner]

My ass. Just because individual makers are good doesn't mean the average product stacks up well. That's **** loads of substandard olive oil out there and I for one will only buy from trusted sources. You can gamble with the other stuff if you wish.

[Dinner]

Check this video out:

http://www.chow.com/stories/11508

[MikeH]

Not googling something before pontificating about it on Poly is really quite dumb.