[Urbane Guerrilla]

Prickly pear fruit is something different over here. The Spanish speakers call them tunas and they are the purplish fruit of the prickly-pear cactus, that usually low-growing paddle-shaped stuff you see in Westerns. In season the fruits bud off the edges and tops of the cactus paddles and have the same bristle pattern on their skin the paddles do, but no needles -- or at least not by the time they make it to the markets. They make a good jam, the fruits do, and the paddles themselves are picked, de-needled, peeled, sliced into strips and boiled as a vegetable. They come off somewhat like stewed okra but not so slimy, tasting generally, well, green. No doubt full of vitamins and antioxidants and all that good stuff.

I have a nice hot chile de arbol bush in a pot on our patio that I need to harvest the chiles off of. They are pretty much dried -- no parrots flying around to eat them off the plant -- and should serve nicely for kicking up the next batch of chili powder -- see recipe in the Most Recent Recipe Thread.