For the first time in the history of this blog, I’ve decided to delete a post. Last week I wrote about the nomination hearings for Judge Barrett, whom I definitely don’t want to see on the Supreme Court–not that I’m so thrilled by and large with any of the conservative justices already on the court.
I thought about that piece all week, though, and reconsidered, because every time I started to work on the next new post for things I was actually excited about, it bothered me to see it here, and I decided that meant something. I have voiced some fairly strong opinions in my time, here and elsewhere, and I generally stand by them in retrospect. One of my convictions, however, is that I don’t like signs that someone is cooking with bile, a chip on their shoulder, or is making blanket statements, and that includes myself. A difficult thing to balance because we live in the real world, and there’s a lot to be upset about right now.
As my daughter pointed out last week and as I’ve said myself to loved ones who wanted to dissect the headlines when I needed a break, we all have heard way too much to want to hear even more of it right now at the dinner table. We need an oasis of some kind. So I’ve reconsidered and decided it doesn’t need to be here.
SlowFoodFast is one of my own longer-lasting places of calm–well, usually calm, or at least calm-ish. Sometimes I have to remind myself of that, take a step back and a deep breath or two (with a mask on) and get on with things…because I’ve been waiting to spring a couple of ideas I’d rather have written about instead.
This is my place to rethink and experiment with cooking methods, share my ideas about getting more out of ordinary inexpensive ingredients and kitchen gadgets, explore unfamiliar techniques and foods, and generally do the grown-up equivalent of climbing a chair and sampling every jar or bottle in the spice cabinet just to see what they taste like (which, you are probably not surprised, I did pretty often as a kid. I never actually got caught, either, now that I think about it).
I’m still more or less that kid and the cabinet keeps getting taller and springing some interesting new items. As, for instance, cactus tunas (prickly pears), which are in at my local market and slightly ugly on the outside–often scarred or ashy-looking in spots. It wasn’t really obvious why there should be several bags of them in the last-chance bin because the fresh ones aren’t markedly different. And you’d think people would be grabbing them up. Here they are, spines trimmed off, no need to go out and harvest them yourself and take the risk of high-fiving any cacti.
When I saw the cactus tunas at the store, I remembered a story from last year in Atlas Obscura about a Sicilian liqueur, bright jewel-toned stuff, made from these cactus tunas steeped in strong alcohol plus sugar syrup and aged a bit as kind of a thick fruit brandy. Not that I was really going to put up a cactus cordial myself–I don’t really have the head for drink, and when I do, it has to prove its worth to me in a few sips. What if it were only kind of bland, like an alcohol/watermelon kind of thing?
But I still wanted a bag of them to take home. These are the kinds of fruits that grow on the paddle cacti the lonesome teenager in Cinema Paradiso cut to use for salad plates on his one picnic date with the elusive rich girl. Cue the music…
…It still took me a full week to dare to deal with them.
The tough leathery skins turn out to be no big deal, even the obviously blemished ones, as long as the spines are definitely off–some people recommend rubber gloves in case. You rinse the tunas and just peel them with a paring knife, and the skins slip off pretty easily. All of the ones in my bag were fine inside and unspoiled, no matter how blemished they were on the peel. Just inside the skins is a pale greenish-yellow-white layer–rather tart, like watermelon rind–and then the brilliant, multicolored fruit itself, also textured like watermelon, and with much the same kind of taste, maybe crossed with cucumber.
The fruit varies in color–one might be bright magenta, another a deep ruddy brick red, and some in the farmers’ markets are a sherbety pale orange, yellow or even honeydew green inside. My camera refused to believe what my eyes were seeing here in my kitchen or to give me an option partway between fluorescent and natural light, so the colors don’t really show up as bright in the picture as they actually are. Anyway, they’re pretty showy.
Cactus tunas have a lot of smallish seeds that are pretty hard, more like guava seeds than watermelon pips, which makes it clear why they don’t really gain mainstream popularity in the US–well, that and the fact that paddle cactus really only grows readily in the southwest. And that other than bananas, most Americans barely eat the fresh bulk whole fruits available to them in their own regions anymore. But still.
If you don’t mind the seeds, you can slice the tunas and put them in a green or fruit salad, as you might with watermelon chunks, or just eat them as-is with a spoon, which is what I ended up doing with most of them. Not glamorous, but definitely refreshing in a week of high temperatures and residual smoke from the Bobcat Fire.
If the seeds are more of a pain than you want to deal with, you can probably blitz the fruit in a food processor or blender with some water and strain them out for a cooling drink. Add a little lemon or lime juice, with or without a little rosewater or mint, and you have something refreshing and subtle, and not too sweet.
Or you could add sugar and a tiny amount of citric acid to the cut-up fruit, let it sit a few minutes, then microwave it and see if that breaks it down enough to sieve out the seeds, then make a fruit spread [UPDATE 10/20/20: No, unfortunately, it doesn’t work that well, so don’t bother–maybe chop or grate the raw pulp and put it through a food mill or cheesecloth or a mesh sieve, but definitely don’t cook it] or freeze the deseeded pulp in popsicle molds for paletas. Or, of course, infuse it into vodka for a few weeks until it glows a brilliant deep sunset red, mix it with sugar syrup, age it in a rustic antique glass jug and show it off under Mediterranean skies.
Filed under: cooking, frugality, fruits | Tagged: food, fruits and vegetables, recipes |
Slow Food Fast 