I love to make jam and marmalade, but I cringe at the amount of sugar in most recipes. That sugar is necessary to make the product jell. But in researching my new book "A Desert Feast," I spoke to many professional chefs and learned some secrets. One, from Rusty the cook at EXO Roast, is how to make jam with less sugar. Here's what I learned.
Prickly pear pads or nopales are a common vegetable in Mexico, as common as green beans in the U.S. They are a traditional food in Southern Arizona, brought by people who migrated from Mexio and eaten long before that for millenia by people who lived on the wild foods of the desert. Here are instructions for how to prepare the pads and several recipes to make nopales your new favorite vegetable.
You can find many recipes for prickly pear pads and fruit in my Cooking the Wild Southwest, Delicious Recipes for Desert Plants and The The Prickly Pear Cookbook.
Those of us who live in the Sonoran Desert are odd ducks. Many of us eat and relish cactus, just like people living on this land have done for around 10,000 years. This fact is one of the many reasons Tucson was named a UNESCO City of Gastronomy. My blogmate, Tia Marta, wrote about how to gather and prepare cholla cactus buds. A small handful of buds (cleaned of thorns) supply as much calcium as a glass of milk. You can read her post here.