Yeah, I’m doing listicles now. And listicles sounds like a portmanteau for testicles that pull to one side, so, you know, balls.

There’s a book that I highly recommend by Larry Olmsted called Real Food/Fake Food. In it, Olmsted discusses food fraud, with an emphasis on Italian food (which I love); the gist of it, if you’re not much for book-readin’, is that thanks to America’s misplaced values and general lack of respect and basic human decency, we consume enormous amounts of food that’s not what it claims to be, that could not legally be sold as such in other countries that care more about things like accurate labeling, health, farmers, etc.

Olmsted talks a lot about olive oil, and he gives some excellent advice on how to shop for the good stuff, along with what makes it good in the first place. I won’t try to reproduce his tips here, because I want you to read his book, but I will give you a few, brief notes. First, regardless of the label on your olive oil, if it’s any good, it has flavor. It should have a peppery finish in the back of your mouth. When trying a new brand, take a sip of it, let it roll around in your mouth, and see if it has that kick. If it doesn’t, ditch it.

Second, when you buy olive oil, buy less, more often. That huge jug of Kirkland brand from Costco may seem like a good deal, but I assure you it is not. It didn’t start out very good to begin with, but by the time you finish off the bottle, you’d be wrong to even call it edible. Unless you’re cooking for a living, you do not need giant bottles of oil — it simply doesn’t have the shelf life. You may be used to the taste of rancid oil, in which case you need to give your taste buds are-education. I’ve adopted the habit of buying the smallest bottle I can get, of a decent brand. There’s no truly ‘good’ olive oil at my local grocery store, but there is one, somewhat passable brand, so I buy that if I need something right away. I’m not going to mention the brand by name because it’s not good enough for me to promote it, even if I’m promoting it as barely acceptable.

My third tip is one that not everyone would agree with, but it’s my opinion that, if at all possible, you should try to get oil that all comes from the same farm, and was made at the same time. There’s just something wrong about a bottle of olive oil — a fruit juice — that’s a blend of oils from four or five different continents. There are excellent olive oils from Australia, Chile, California, Italy, Spain, Israel, begging the question, for what legitimate purpose would they be mixed together, if not to make a higher quality oil cheap, or if you prefer, to make a cheap oil taste a little better? Olive oils from different farms, and different varietals, taste different, and that’s a good thing — rather than trying to produce some homogeneous, predictable product on a massive scale, oil producers should be celebrating the unique flavors from each region, each farm, each pressing.

For more tips, you need to read Real Food/Fake Food, but if you already have some olive oil at home and you’ve realized it’s the latter, you don’t have to throw it out. There are still plenty of things you can do with that oil:

1. Oil your squeaky door hinges. This is one that Olmsted recommends, and I concur. One of the advantages to lubricating those hinges with olive oil instead of something like WD40 is that olive oil doesn’t have any solvents in it, so it won’t cause rust to form over the long term. Olive oil is also more viscous, so it will stay on metal parts a little longer.

2. Recondition some leather. I’ve had great success revitalizing old, dry leather by soaking it in cheap olive oil. Depending on the size of the item being brought back to live, you can either wipe on a few coats of oil, or fully submerge it. I’ve used olive oil on old belts and shoes, but I’ve also used it on leather tool handles — just be aware that if you have rodents, they may be persuaded to eat your tool handles if they have been soaked in olive oil.

3. Darken light-colored leather. A few years ago I decided I wanted some cowboy boots, but I wasn’t very happy with what I could find for sale. I wanted boots made for riding, not line dancing or walking around town. (I about shit when I went into a ‘western store’ and the saleswoman asked me if I wanted them for “dancin’” — seriously, what the hell is this world coming to?) When I couldn’t find any new boots that met my standards, I looked around on eBay and found some nicely broken-in boots in my size. Unfortunately they were a very light tan, and the leather was also pretty dried out. I treated them with olive oil, which turned them a nice, dark brown, and plumped up the leather. I later hit them with some bees’ wax to protect them and stiffen them up a bit while they sit in storage, because, you know, I haven’t been dancin’ much lately.

4. Brush your teeth. According to some, if you’ve run out of toothpaste and you can’t shake that sensation that a cat took a dump in your mouth, giving your face hole a good swishing of olive oil will clean it right out. I’ve only done this once and I hated it, but that doesn’t mean you won’t like it.

5. Soak your rusty tools. Olive oil won’t break down rust like WD40 or PB Blaster, but it will soak into your seized-up hand tools. Soak them and loosen them up, and wipe them clean — the oil will stay in the moving parts and keep moisture out. It’s also a good pre-treatment for shovels and other garden tools, to keep mud from sticking to them.

6. Pour some on your chicken nest box. I recently wrote about my new nest box, which I’m still quite happy about, but one issue I have is that a few of my birds are determined to roost on it. The potential roosting areas are sloped and slick, but my birds are committed. And if they poop enough on the sheet metal, it can build up and give them a better surface to grip. So tonight I put a layer of California Olive Ranch oil on the box, and the birds slide right off. As a salad oil, it totally sucks, but as a non-stick coating for poultry equipment it’s not bad.

7. Rub it on your dry skin. A little dab’ll do ya. It won’t give you an olive complexion, though. That’s not how that works.

8. Protect your cast iron. A lot of us have cast iron cookware, but if you’re anything like me, you also have some cast iron machinery in your shop— it’s heavy and it’s rigid, making it the ideal material for precision machines where vibration is an issue. The problem is that cast iron rusts like crazy. To protect it, try a mix of olive oil and bees’ wax — wipe it on and rub it in; it helps boards slide across the table saw or through the planer more easily, too.

9. Stain some wood. Rub some olive oil into your outdoor furniture or other, weathered wood surfaces. It will darken the wood and help preserve it. I wouldn’t recommend it for fine furniture or gun stocks or anything like that, but for an old picnic table, why not? Some people recommend it for knife handles and for conditioning cutting boards, but since it’s a food oil that goes rancid, I think those are bad ideas.

10. Clean up some goo. Olive oil can help with getting paint off your skin or stickers and other goo-based products off various items around your house. Ever buy something at the store and then spend the next hour trying to peel a stupid sticker off it? Ever put a decal for your favorite band on your car, only to have their singer get #metoo’d? Soak some cheap olive oil in there. And when you’ve used it all up, don’t buy it again — stick to the good stuff. You won’t regret it.