Naturalist View October 2010

The Deal

It is a few minutes before 7 a.m. as a blue SUV pulls into the gas station at the corner of Oracle and Ina. Pulling up to the pumps, a scruffy, older man with a gray beard and wearing a black western hat gets out and starts filling his car with the cheap stuff. He looks around as if searching for someone. Finished filling his tank he pulls the SUV next to some bushes that screen the car from the busy intersection. He gets out of the car and opens the rear door and sits on back bumper. He sips on a cup of coffee still scanning the area as if expecting someone. The gas station attendant in the service booth begins to take notice.

A few minutes later a rather beat up yellow and white pick-up truck pulls up and parks just ahead of the SUV. The driver, a large, tough looking 40’ish man gets out as the man in the black hat approaches him. A few words are exchanged and the driver of the pickup returns to the vehicle and pulls out a small Styrofoam cooler and approaches the man in the black hat. He pulls a clear plastic ziplock bag that is filled with what appears, to the gas station attendant, a white substance. The station attendant is now devoting his full attention to the scene outside. The man in the black hat pulls out a roll of money and exchanges it for the zip lock bag. Both men return to their vehicles and drive off in opposite directions. The gas station attendant can’t believe what he just saw and then realizes that he did not even get the license plate of either car. He wonders “should I call 911?”

I, on the other hand, am saying to myself as I drive my blue SUV back to Saddlebrooke, “It was sure nice of Tom to meet me halfway with those frozen mice. Two hundred mice will last me for a while. Now I can get home in time to write the October ‘Naturalist View’ article.”

Tuna in the Desert?

Early October is the last chance to harvest those prickly pears, because the blossoms you saw in May that turned to green pears in June, pink in July and purple in August will be gone by November. “Where do they go?” you ask. Well, of course, I pick a few buckets to feed my box turtles and Desert tortoise and  make prickly pear ice tea, jam, syrup etc. But, that does not account for the hundreds of thousands, yea maybe millions of pears that were here in August. And even if the rest of you who are reading this indulged in making tasty Prickly Pear Margaritas, it still wouldn’t account for all those pears. Of course we humans are not the only ones that have a taste for the “Tuna” of the desert. Tuna is the Mexican name for the fruit of the cactus.

During daylight hours, you may observe many birds, such as finches and thrashers, feeding on the ripe fruit. In fact, as the fruit starts to ferment, some birds seem to indulge a little too much. This fruit is also a favorite of box turtles and tortoises as well as Javalina, Coyotes, Ground and Rock Squirrels, Packrats Mice, Fox, Rabbits, Badgers, Coatis and even Deer. Some, such as the Chelonia (Turtles and Tortoises) and the Javalina have enzymes that can handle the spines and glochids (they are microscopic hairs called that will stick in your skin and drive you to distraction). Other animals have developed methods of removing most of these by brushing or rolling the pear to remove the spines.

Protect your skin during the harvesting, as well as the cleaning process of the cactus fruit by using tongs and rubber gloves. Once you have harvested the fruit, you will need to remove the glochids. I prefer burning the spines and glochids with my blow torch and a pair of BBQ tongs. It only takes moments of rotating the fruit in the flame and they are burned away. They can also be removed by cutting them away with a knife or peeling off the skin, of course you should wear good rubber gloves that should be disposed of afterwards. The native people of the area used limbs of the Desert Broom plant to brush the spines away and then rolled the fruit in dirt or sand. Once you have prepared the pears this way you can proceed safely to use the cactus fruit in many ways.

I usually make prickly pear syrup which can be used in many recipes.

Such as:

Prickly pear margaritas - Looks great! Tastes great! Be careful!

12 ounces crushed ice

8 ounces prickly pear syrup (recipe below)
1 ounce tequila

Combine ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth.  Serve with a wedge of sliced lime. 

Prickly Pear Cactus Jelly Recipe

4 cups strained prickly pear tuna juice

6 cups granulated sugar

2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 package pectin

Wash and chop prickly pear tunas as previously instructed.  Cover chopped fruit with water even with level of tunas in pan.  Cook over medium heat for approximately 20 minutes.  Use cheesecloth and a colander to strain liquid from cooked prickly pear fruit. 
Combine strained prickly pear juice and lemon juice and cook over medium heat until solution is boiling.  Once boiling add sugar and pectin and stir constantly.  Continue to keep mixture at a rolling boil for two minutes, then remove pan from heat.  If canning jelly, ladle into sterilized jars and water bath can for 16 minutes.  Prickly pear jelly may take up to two weeks to gel inside the jars.  If using for fresh jelly, cool jelly and store covered in the refrigerator for up to one month.

Prickly pear syrup recipe

6 cups strained prickly pear tuna juice
6 cups white sugar
4 tbsp. lemon juice
Wash and chop prickly pear tunas after removal of spines.  Cover chopped fruit with water about 2 inches above level of tunas in pot.  Cook over medium heat for approximately 20 minutes.  Use cheesecloth and a colander to strain liquid from cooked prickly pear fruit.  This will make the strained juice thinner to increase production of the syrup without any decline in flavor. 
Combine strained prickly pear juice and lemon juice and cook over medium heat until solution is boiling.  Once boiling add sugar and stir constantly.  Keep at a rolling boil until all of the sugar is dissolved. Then remove pan from heat.  If canning syrup, ladle into sterilized jars and water bath can for 16 minutes.  If using syrup immediately, cool syrup and store covered in the refrigerator for up to one month.
Many more uses and recipes can be found online

A Puzzle

What is the connection between Prickly pear cactus, Aztecs and Betsy Ross?


 Solution:

Cochineal (Dactylopius coccus)

Cochineal is a traditional red dye of pre-Hispanic Mexico. This precious dyestuff was obtained not from a plant, but from an insect that lives its life sucking on a plant. The host plants are the flattened stems (pads) of prickly pear cacti (Opuntia), especially the species called nopales. The animal is a scale insect that manufactures a deep maroon pigment and stores this pigment in body fluids. Early Mixtec (Aztec and Mayan) Indians used indigo, derived from native legumes, for blues and cochineal for various shades of red.

Scale insects are lazy creatures. A cactus pad is colonized by a female, who produces some new females that settle around the mother. A female inserts the proboscis, a tube, into the pad for obtaining nourishment, and secretes a white, web-like, wax-based material over the area for camouflage and to prevent desiccation. Males are small and live for only a week, just long enough to mate with as many females as possible. I have noticed that in nature males all seem to have a similar role. Hmm.

Mixtexs and their successors in southern Mexico farmed cochineal so they could crush the insects and extract the red body fluids for dye. When Spaniards arrived in Mexico, they were fascinated by the intense scarlet color of cochineal dye, which was brighter and better than anything in the Old World. Textiles dyed with cochineal were shipped to Europe and became the rage; in fact, next to gold cochineal was the most desired import commodity from Middle America.

The red coats as in “the Red Coats are coming” and the red stripes in the first American flag sewn by Betsy Ross were made by fabrics dyed with Carmine. Carmine is the name of the color pigment obtained from the insect Dactylopius coccus (Cochineal) that lives on cacti from the genus Opuntia.

Red Food Coloring from Beetles?

The common food colorants cochineal and carmine (carminic acid) are indeed made from Central and South American ground beetles, cochineal. Aside from food, these pigments are also used in many cosmetics, shampoos and even fruit juice!

Maybe that’s more information than you wanted to know.