Nopales: Found Food

When my clever and resourceful husband John took a winter trip to Florida he found two very exciting free foods ready for harvest. The first was pink grapefruits. It seemed that every house had at least one tree heavily burdened with the luscious fruit growing in the yard. A lot of the fruit went unpicked because all the snowbirds were taking medication that explicitly forbid them to eat grapefruit. OK... So John loaded his checked baggage with the sweet ruby gems.

The other fun food John brought home to snowbound Central Oregon was a dozen nopales, also known in English as "cactus paddles." These are the vegetable part of the same cactus that grows the prickly pear fruit. They are best and most tender when harvested in the spring. The cactus that he harvested his paddles from was a "no spine" variety in the neighbors' yard, bred for ease of consumption. We had a ton of fun researching recipes and cooking our nopales. Many nopal fans on the Internets said that it's a lot like okra. It needs cooking and even when cooked perfectly it still has a bit of a slimy texture. We found that slimy texture to be a little foreign to our palettes and not very pleasant. But we did enjoy the light lemony flavor they had. Our first project was to grille the little paddles to see what that did. They popped and sizzled on the fire as the juicy slime cooked away. But even after 10 minutes grilling when we bit into them they were still quite slimy. So I chopped them up and sauteed them in butter; very tasty but still slimy.

Next the bits went into scrambled eggs with green onions and cheese. I served the "Nopales en Juevos Revueltos" over pinto beans. It was a delicious meal and we both agreed the nopales were free food that was well worth John exporting from Florida.