Finishing up our week of water themed posts, here’s a culinary question – what can I do with leftover brine?

I had some awesome olives the other day – sharp and tasty – and the leftover brine smelled herby and was a lovely purple colour – a really developed flavour. It seemed a waste to throw it away but I thought it might be a little too salty to use in other cooking.

You guys impressed me with your multiple uses for post-pickle vinegar – is there anything similar for brine?

Harking back to the original inspiration for the whole of Recycle This (pistachio nut shells), I’ve been wondering about olive stones recently.

Olive pits aren’t as big or pretty as other fruit stones but my, we “generate” a lot of them. Given we live in the windswept north of England, we’re probably not going to have a lot of success growing them into trees – and even if we did, if we try to sprout them from every stone we de-fleshed, we’d be quickly overrun!

So what else can we do with them? As with pistachio nut shells, it seems a waste to just compost them.

Googling around, I’ve seen some suggestions of using them for fuel – anyone know anything about that? Do any companies that pit them pre-sale do anything like that?

I also have half of memory of being able to grind them up and use them in homemade exfoliators like ground walnut shells – I don’t know how hard they are to grind up though…

Any other ideas?