Accidental learning

I’ve always enjoyed learning new things, but sometimes the most fun comes from learning things that are unexpected. Even if the thing was (or, should’ve been) obvious, that doesn’t necessarily change the fun. I was reminded of that recently.

I’ve had an ongoing problem with olives. I read a long time ago that there’s no such things as pitted black olives, because black olives are ripe and too soft to pit, and so, pitted black olives are actually green olives died black. I have no idea whether that’s really true, but the point is I thought it was. So, I only bought pitted green olives, which I often cut up when making pasta sauce or doctoring a frozen pizza. That was fine until one day I accidentally bought a jar of whole green olives, and it was annoying to slice them and get the pit out.

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about how I really should buy a pitter so I wouldn’t have to mess with the olives any more. Coincidentally, I’d also just bought some fresh garlic and decided that instead of chopping it up, I’d use the garlic press sitting in my kitchen drawer. It may have been the second or third time I used it, but I finally noticed there was a pitter in the handle of the garlic press.

The photo above shows the garlic press. The olive goes in the cup-like thing behind where the garlic goes, and the pin-like thing pushes the pit out. Simple—but it’s something I never noticed in all these years (I can’t remember if Nigel had it when I arrived in New Zealand, or whether we bought it afterward, but either way I’ve used it many times without ever thinking about that little cup-like thing.

The reality is, it’s not very good as a garlic press: It squashes the garlic rather than pressing it. I thought about that every time I used it, and wondered if the fact it’s enamelled maybe made the holes too small or not sharp enough to extrude the garlic. I was thinking about giving up and going back to chopping up the garlic instead when I suddenly noticed the cup-like thing.

I had a brief moment where I felt stupid—why hadn’t I ever noticed that?!! But that dissolved quickly into excitement that I could finally pit my olives—and yes, I really did get excited about pitting olives. Maybe I do need to get out more, but that was going to save me so much prep times and, especially, effort, so of course I got excited about it.

Now, this is obviously not the most important thing ever, and anyone else might have been too embarrassed to admit they didn’t know about the pitter, but I’m not most people. And maybe some day someone who also didn’t know about this will find this post and be similarly excited about being able to pit olives with ease. Or, maybe they’ll just learn a new thing they didn’t know before.

Learning new things is fun. No one ever said it always had to be earth-shattering. And, it’s perfectly okay to get excited about finding a new use for a kitchen gadget—and to talk about it.