Green Olives with Raw Almonds

Olives are a staple of Moroccan cuisine. At his award-winning San Francisco restaurant, Aziza, Moroccan-born chef Mourad Lahlou serves this marinated olive mix as a cocktail nibble. He likes to include a variety of green olives with different textures, sizes and degrees of intensity; he uses olives with pits because pitted ones lose too much flavor and get mushy when marinated. The blanched almonds are a fun twist-they drink up the infused oil and become crunchy-soft, tasting more like olives than almonds.