I’ve been waiting for an excuse to make the Spicy Crushed Olives with Pistachios from Smitten Kitchen Keepers, and I decided they’d be a great snack before dinner when we hosted Friendsgiving this year.

This is a super simple recipe to make, so I put it together a couple of hours before I told our guests they could arrive. Iit came together very fast, especially since my husband had already shelled and chopped the pistachios for me the day before.

Folks seemed to enjoy this, and it went well alongside the two cheeses I’d gotten (a mini wheel of Harbison, and a wedge of Brabander Reserve). The leftovers are holding up well in the fridge, and I think this would be easy to scale up or down as needed.

I used castelvetrano olives, and figured out that a half-pound of pitted olives was almost exactly two cups. I do think this would work pretty well with any unstuffed green olive, but the castelvetranos are nice because they’re large, so the stand up to the crushing and there’s lots of surface area for the pistachios to adhere to.