I find them in recipes fairly often[1], and make tapenade sometimes, but they're actually pretty easy to work into many of the meat or fish recipes that I make[2], as long as the flavors are complementary. Hell, even my first regular,
staple "recipe" when I started learning to cook had olives in it and was super easy: a 3-egg scramble with chili powder, smoked paprika, baby spinach, quartered black olives and optionally a little bit of crumbled feta. Super fast, super easy, super delicious, and it came from just looking at my spice rack plus deciding that I wanted some Mediterranean flavors in my eggs.
This is probably made a lot easier by the fact that the cuisines I decided to focus on when I had to narrow it down for cooking were Mediterranean (excl Italy) + Middle Eastern + North Indian, and most of the Mediterranean makes regular use of olives.
[1] I'm relatively new to regular cooking, since the first few years out of college, Google fed me, so a lot of my cooking is still following recipes by the book
[2] I really enjoy Fish Veracruz, which is a good example of this
I mistyped in my previous comment: I don't make the eggs with Spanish olives, I make them with black olives. I find Spanish olives harder to cook with because the flavor can overwhelm other flavors, but I do eat them alone and every once in a while find a recipe that works well with them. I cook much more often with black and kalamata olives.
This is probably made a lot easier by the fact that the cuisines I decided to focus on when I had to narrow it down for cooking were Mediterranean (excl Italy) + Middle Eastern + North Indian, and most of the Mediterranean makes regular use of olives.
[1] I'm relatively new to regular cooking, since the first few years out of college, Google fed me, so a lot of my cooking is still following recipes by the book
[2] I really enjoy Fish Veracruz, which is a good example of this