This summer has been a wildly overdue and blissfully extended break from using my brain for money, during which time I frolicked and cut capers and picnicked and read and daydreamed and ate ten (10) oysters. Unfortunately this blog also suffered from my briefly deadbeat absenteeism, but given everything going on locally, globally, macro, micro, I’m not sure anyone noticed or minded. That is not me nudging for expressions of having keenly felt my absence like a toddler who hasn’t yet grasped object permanence — though you’re welcome to — but merely a blunt observation. Nevertheless, I’m back for 2025, a year that is so preposterously far into the future that it’s bordering on inconceivable, with a simple recipe for basil olive dip to augment your summer snacking, whether half-hearted or elaborate.

I’m going to keep this blog post concise and sprightly to match; partly because if you’re in New Zealand like me you’re probably feeling sluggish of brain and ill-inclined to commit to walls of text — especially if you’ve spent much of your summer forced to write endless submissions against shady bills being cloak-and-daggered into parliament while people’s backs are turned — and not least because once again I find myself beginning a blog post at midnight on a school night despite my stern self-reprimanding to do the exact opposite, or even half of the opposite, in 2025. See, as I said. Concise and sprightly.

To the dip: if you’ve got a food processor all you need to do is open a few tubs and containers and you’re good to go, but with a well-honed forearm, sound grip strength, and a good knife you can make this minus the heavy machinery. A boisterous quantity of briny, salty olives, a musky handful of basil staining your palms with its perfume like a scratch and sniff perfume magazine advertisement, and a satiny slab of cream cheese all combine to make a dip that tastes like so much more — but not too much more — than the sum of its parts.

Basil is so heady in its perfume, like the sun lowering itself over a forest, that even if you’re living somewhere that’s currently in the middle of winter — like Wellington — then you can still enjoy a brief glimpse of summer with this dip. The saltiness of the olives is echoed very pleasantly in the salty tang of the blindingly snowy cream cheese. Together they make a dip robust and sturdy with the olives’ near-meaty texture pulverised yet present, and not so salty that you couldn’t drag an also-salted cracker through its pillowy depths.

And I know pitted olives are considered inferior but the first time I made this with proper olives; it was a nightmare trying to daintily hack away the flesh from the stones, on top of which I’m not sure you can taste the difference with all these flavours going on.

Leftovers, should they transpire, would be most welcome spooned into a halved baked potato (assuming you can bear having the oven on for that long) or spread on a toasted bagel half, and I imagine you could fashion it into something of a pasta sauce or creamy salad dressing. And while this is ideal for entertaining, don’t rule it out for simply entertaining your own self.

For further snacking and entertainment, I recommend my chilli oil feta and pine nuts, the m’tabbal qarae, this avocado, labaneh, and preserved lemon spread, and this dish of white beans, three ways.

Basil olive dip

Fantastically simple and salty, and the hardest part is cleaning the food processor. That being said, if you’re camping or light on equipment, you could make this with a bowl and some vigorous chopping and stirring. The simplicity extends to the ingredient quantities, which are intended to be lazily yet instinctively reached for rather than scrupulously measured. Recipe by myself.

• 20g — a significant handful — of fresh basil leaves and stems, plus extra for garnish if wished
• 1 cup (around 180g) pitted green olives
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice — bottled is fine
• 250g full-fat cream cheese, not the kind labelled ‘spreadable’
• 1-2 tablespoons Greek yoghurt, optional

1: Throw most of the basil leaves and stems — saving a couple of choice leaves for garnish — into a food processor along with the cup of pitted green olives and process on a low speed to break it down into a textured green mixture.

2: Add the three tablespoons of olive oil and the teaspoon of lemon juice and process at a higher speed — the olives and basil won’t get anywhere near completely smooth, but they should be significantly more amalgamated.

3: At this point you can remove a small quantity of the olive mixture to ripple through the finshed dip if you like, though it really makes no difference, tastewise. Either way, spoon in the 250g cream cheese — straight from the fridge is fine — and process, scraping down the sides occasionally with a spatula, to thoroughly combine. Pulse in a couple tablespoons of yoghurt if you’d like a softer texture.

4: Serve scattered with the remaining basil leaves and rippled with the reserved olive mixture, if you did indeed reserve it. If not required right away, or if you have leftovers, store refrigerated for up to four days in an airtight container. It can probably sit for longer but I doubt it will last that long.

Makes around 350ml.

Notes:

• Try to make sure the cream cheese is full fat and regular or block, NOT the kind labelled ‘spreadable’ — although it’s not entirely out of the question, the texture of regular cream cheese is far superior for the purposes of this dip, being thicker and denser.
• If you don’t like basil, I would replace this with the same quantity of flat-leaf parsely — or if you’re especially fond of it, this might work with the similarly pungent coriander, though it wouldn’t be my first choice here.

music lately:

Rollercoaster by Spacemen 3. God, that end bit! And also all the bits that precede it!

Wut by Kalifa, somehow this song has slipped from my fingers but now it’s back, with those monster strutting horns and his rapid-fire yet insouciant deep-fried vocals.

Somewhere That’s Green performed — owned — by Ellen Greene, from the musical Little Shop of Horrors, I find this song hard to stomach in its sincerity, even for musical theatre and even for me, unless Greene is singing it, by which I mean she’s embodying it and it flows from her like a moon-led tide. Try as you might you can NOT predict whether she’s going to rockstar belt or murmur the next word and she somehow ice skates on the tightrope of heartbreak and humour.

PS: ReliefAid’s Gaza Appeal updated on 10 December painting an alarming yet unsurprising image of “indescribable pain”, but still they continue supplying families with water if you want to donate to their considerable efforts. Also look, readers in LA — a lot of people including myself are thinking of you hard during this unfathomable time that no one should have to fathom. I am hardly a resource hub but this list of GoFundMe accounts with less than 20% of their goal could be a good place to start if anyone wants to help just a few of the people who have to rebuild from nothing, and who else is going to help the people but the people?