Every month, we feature select items in our stores and provide you with detailed descriptions. Many are new items and/or on sale!

Vera Jane’s Olive Oil
New and Improved!

The history of olive oil stretches back millennia; the history of olive oil at Dorothy Lane Market goes back some 50 years; and maybe for you olive oil is a recent discovery. For me, enlightenment came about 10 years ago at the Fancy Food Show in New York where I went to an olive oil tasting. I must have tried 30 different oils that day alone, and I was amazed at the diversity of flavors and textures. On that morning, I woke up to what a treasure olive oil really is. It’s rich, tasty, adds flavor to almost anything, cleans out your arteries, and makes your skin glow like a Greek god.

Over the past several years, many of us at DLM have become olive oil aficionados. On any given day, you could find Dennis, Dottie, Ed, Wally, Todd, Fred and others dipping their bread in it, pouring it in their soups and salads, or even sneaking a spoonful in their office. It was, then, a natural progression for us to find a very good olive oil to put our own name on. We finally settled on an oil from Italy that had good body, medium fruitiness, and a hint of pepper — a very good oil for everyday use. We bought it by the barrel to keep the cost low, and we bottled it ourselves. We named it Vera Jane’s after Vera Jane Mayne, the current President of Dorothy Lane Market. It became, by far, our best-selling olive oil, and we were content to continue with it indefinitely.

Now all that has changed thanks to a chance meeting in Tuscany, Italy. The meeting was between Norman Mayne and a young Italian-American named Alex Zanetti. Alex is very well dressed and well spoken; he speaks Italian with a perfect Tuscan accent and English with a very slightly twanged Tennessee accent. (Sorry, young ladies, he already has a girlfriend.) Sounds like the stuff of James Bond, I know, but I’m not making this up…Norman met Alex through a mutual friend and learned that he was just getting in to the export business with a focus on some of Tuscany’s best foods. Alex, and especially his Italian mother Lily, it seems, are olive oil savants. These people know good olive oil. And they found one for us that simply blew us away! It has a stupendous texture and flavor. It is dark green in color with an amazingly deep fruit and olivy flavor. And it gives you a nice little kick of black pepper at the back of your throat. To find an oil of similar quality, you would have to spend well over $20 for the same-sized bottle. But because Alex is a friend of the producer, he was able to put us together so that we can buy the oil directly from Italy and sell this bottle at a great price. For the price of an everyday oil, you can enjoy a top, extra-virgin olive oil from what is perhaps the world’s most famous olive oil-producing region, Tuscany. To kick it off, we are giving a good discount on it this month, so be sure to load up! Whether you are a longtime connoisseur of olive oil or you are just now discovering it, we are sure that you will love our new — and improved — Vera Jane’s Olive Oil.

500 ml bottle $9.99 save $3.00

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Recipes
This month's new featured recipes

Prizes
Every month, we give away several prizes. All
you have to do is use your Club DLM card when
you shop, and you will automatically be entered.