Green Olive and Walnut Salad

This dish appears on every meze table near the Aegean Sea. It’s best made with what we call ‘scratched green olives’ (early harvested and lightly crushed before being soaked in salty water). They come from the Edremit area in the northwest.

The world’s first known edible olives were cultivated in Anatolia 6000 years ago, long before anybody talked about nations called Greece or Turkey. These days Turkey is one of the largest olive oil producers in the world and argu