We’re Savoring ‘On the Road’ in Ghana

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This special post of Savor the Southwest is ‘one from the road’, where we enjoy a recipe from Ghana that is reminiscing of tamales so beloved in the Southwest…

Towering, buttressed cotton trees are treasured in the landscape of the Northern Region, Ghana, West Africa.

World travel is a favorite, beautiful thing…we learn so much that is new to us while meeting new people and cultures. It’s Savor Sister Emily here, departing a bit from my typical posts to share about my recent travels to Ghana, West Africa. I first visited in March 2025 as an intern for World Institute of African Culture & Tradition (WIACT), an amazing native-led nonprofit working to uncover and restore traditional knowledge in their community, throughout Ghana, and beyond. I returned in January 2026, and hope to visit again soon – I love it so much there!

I fell in love with the community, the place and setting, the culture, and the food. I learned how to make a traditional dish called tibani with a group of friends. Our host Madame Ubeidata is the headmistress of Nasoyiri Junior High School. Overseeing the native tree nursery at the school is Mr. Seidu, who guides students in caring for and learning about the (sometimes forgotten) uses of native plants. Rashid Abubakar Iddrisu founded WIACT, and the organization sponsors several schools with this kind of programming. All three of them (plus Ubeidata’s daughter Azmet, and neighbors and children) shared their knowledge about tibani.

I couldn’t help but notice some similarities between tibani of Ghana, and the tamales (made from corn masa) in Mexico and Latin America which we relish in Tucson and throughout the Southwestern US. They are variations of a delectable starchy dough wrapped in Gbate leaves an steamed in a pot, served with a little sauce or salsa. (Tibani even reminds me a bit of gnocci or malfatti from Italy, made with wheat and/or potato flour!)

The local name of the shrub in Ghana is Gbate.
Emily harvesting with Nasoyiri Junior High School students, leaves of the Gbate shrub for making tibani.

I have not yet been able to verify the species name of the Gbate shrub, but it looks so similar to a plant I know in cultivation from home in the US. See below, Bauhinia variegata in Northern Mexico:

Bauhinia variegata, Naturalized non-native south of Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico. (Family: Fabaceae) Photos: Sue Carnahan (SEINet.org)

Tibani Recipe

Ingredients for Tibani
White cowpeas or cowpea flour (Referred to as “white beans” but are technically cowpeas, Vigna unguiculata versus Phaseolus vulgaris). To make the flour, Ghanaians soak the dry cowpeas, dry again, then mill into a fine flour. Another option for this recipe is to soak and cook the cowpeas, then puree until very smooth.
You could substitute any bean flour (check African or specialty markets), or try online sources for cowpea flour.
Cassava flour
Saltpetre*. This is a naturally occurring ‘cooking salt’ in West Africa, and it can be omitted (it’s just helpful to soften vegetables and reduce cooking time), or just add a little teaspoon of baking soda instead.
Leaves of Gbate shrub, native to Ghana. To substitute, banana leaves or parchment paper can be used. Or definitely corn husks!

Ingredients for sauce:
Small dried fish –
Dried onion, pounded into a powder (or onion powder)
Small red onion
Fresh tomatoes (Roma is fine)
African eggplant (small, white) – check your local African store or farmers market. In Tucson, a few African refugees bring them to market!
Salt

Preparation of Tibani with Stew

Wash Gbate leaves, selecting those that are about the size of the palm of your hand.

White cowpeas (aka beans) are the best for this recipe.
Sift cowpea bean flour to remove impurities. Or, as mentioned above, soak and cook white cowpeas, then puree until very smooth.

Prepare cassava flour by sifting.

Mix the cassava flour and cowpea flour in a ratio of 2:1, cassava to bean.

Add a large pinch of salt

Add 1 teaspoon saltpeter (or baking soda) mixed with a little water. Using too much will result in a strong unpleasant flavor.
Add water slowly while mixing by hand to make a smooth batter.
The right texture is not too wet.
Place a small amount of batter onto one side of the leaf…
Fold it over gently to enclose the batter in the leaf.

Boil the cooking pot over the fire or stove, approximately half full of water. Coil the flexible branches of the Gbate shrub to make a supportive framework upon which to place the tibani.

Carefully place the prepared tibani one by one into the pot, lay them flat so they are evenly distributed in the pot.

Cover and simmer approximately 45 minutes, checking occasionally for doneness.

Tibani are done cooking when batter is firm and no longer sticky.

While the tibani are cooking, prepare the stew:

Sautee onion in oil.
Dried onion can be pounded to a powder for the stew. Or use powdered onion.
Pound a handful of small dried fish.
African eggplant are somewhat bitter, and small.
Add ingredients to the stew one at a time.

The tibani are done when the batter is firm and no longer sticky (like the texture of a cooked tamale!). This requires approximately 45 minutes.

Remove pot from the fire.

Drop the cooked tibani in some cool water to stop the cooking, and to make it easier to unwrap them.

When they are slightly cooler, begin to open each tibani to remove the leaves…
Each tibani is like a tender little dumpling!
Bring your finished stew which will become the sauce for the tibani.
Everyone loved the tibani!
The neighbors and kids come together to enjoy the meal.

The texture of the tibani is similar to that of Mexican tamales, and has a mild sweetness. It’s so pleasant with the rich stew of onion, tomato, fish, and eggplant. Eating together from the same dish is a symbol of unity and kinship, and I certainly felt that way every time I enjoyed a meal in Ghana.

At my home in Tucson, Arizona, I have enjoyed being part of tamaladas, or tamale-making parties (especially around Christmastime in the Southwest). It is also a friends-and-family event, to come together and talk, sharing stories and laughs, and of course enjoy eating from the same tamale pot together…

It was so beautiful and delightful to gather as friends to celebrate a traditional dish made with native and local ingredients in Ghana!

To learn more, visit WIACTghana.org

Thank you for sharing your comments, and let us know if you try making the tibani!

Or, share a story of a dish you enjoyed somewhere in the world that reminded you of a traditional dish from your home.

Asan k’ba (Thank you in Gonja)
Gracias (Thank you in Spanish)

–Savor Sister Emily

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*In the ‘Seasoned Advice’ blog, member “Athanasius” did amazing research about saltpetre!
https://cooking.stackexchange.com/a/128896

It’s Spring and Time for Nopales

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New spring growth on a Opuntia ficus indica prickly pear cactus in my yard.

When spring comes to the desert it’s time for the prickly pear cactus to send out their new pads, in Mexico called nopales or pencas. This is when they are are tender and perfect to harvest for food. Later in their lives, they develop a woody interior structure. 

It’s Carolyn today. Although I have loved gathering wild foods for half a century, I also deeply enjoy my garden. This year was a fabulous carrot year for me. So my thoughts went to combining carrots and nopales.

This was a really good year for carrots in my garden.

Although all prickly pear pads are edible, the easiest to clean are the tall Mexican type called Opuntia ficus indica. These don’t grow wild in the US, preferring the comfort of a garden where they can be watered and protected from the occasional freezing night. 

The  nopales (or nopalitos when cut up small)  are a common vegetable in Mexico and found frequently in Mexican restaurants. They are a long-time Mexican folk remedy for cholesterol and blood sugar issues.When a team of medical investigators did some experiments about 20 years ago, they found that the traditional knowledge was true! 

Now researchers in the US and Europe are using sophisticated laboratory techniques to investigate prickly pear fruits, pads, flowers and seeds as a cure for a wide array of ills. They think they have properties that are antioxidant, antiviral, anti-tumor, anti-diabetic, anti-parasitic, and anti-cancer. Good reasons to include them in your diet!

If you love trying new foods,  you’ll want to share them with family and friends. It’s best to introduce something unusual in the context of something familiar. This easy recipe fills the bill and is delicious as well. 

Roasted Nopales and Carrots

First, you’ll have to clean the prickly pear pad. Using gloves, scrape against the stickers using a steak knive and rinse to made sure they are clean. 

Scrape against the stickers until the pad is clean. 

This recipe does not use exact amounts because it is very flexible. Use what you have. From one medium prickly pear pad, I cut about 24 match-stick size pieces. I used three medium-sized carrots to make 24 small pieces.  You can also add other vegetables such pencil-thin asparagus, rutabaga, or beets.

Put the cut vegetables in a small bowl and drizzle in a little olive oil and toss to cover. Arrange on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper or aluminum foil. Sprinkle with your favorite spices. I used seasoned salt, pepper, and Trader Joe’s citrus-garlic mix. Be generous as this will give your finished dish vibrant flavor. Bake in a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes.

Vegetables ready for roasting.

Tip: After roasting, I realized that the cactus pieces had shrunk to half the size of the carrots, changing the proportions of the dish. I suggest using twice the amount of cactus to other vegetables.

 Transfer to serving dish. If you have seasoned generously you won’t need to add any dressing. If you wish more flavor, a simple homemade herb-heavy vinaigrette will work fine.

Tasty vegetable dish ready for the table.

You can learn more about the history of food in Southern Arizona in my latest book A Desert Feast, the story of the last 4,000 years of food in the Sonoran Desert. Want more recipes using  foods of the Southwest? You’d find ideas for collecting and using 23 easily recognized and gathered desert foods in Cooking the Wild Southwest: Delicious Recipes for Desert Foods.  . Recipes from top Southwest chefs are collected in The New Southwest Cookbook. Just click on the titles for more information. You can learn more about me on my website.

Gifts of Winter Greens in the Desert

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Indeed we’ve been blessed this cool season by some good rains in the Sonoran Desert–and everywhere there is greenery popping up. Weeds, you say? Let’s take a closer look! As our SavorSister Amy shared earlier this month in her tasty “rocket post”, what may LOOK like weeds are actually the gift of wild greens! Tia Marta here to share more ideas for wondrous weed-collecting.

This sweet 4-petaled “Arizona jewel plant” also known as “silverbells” (Streptanthus carinatus), is an endearing wild native mustard with delightfully good taste and nutrition. Planting silverbells seeds can also make a delicate addition to your own edible landscaping.

Out in the desert and in town you can find great patches of silverbells right now, especially in the shade of other desert shrubs. At times like these when there is such plenty (with thanks on our lips for these edibles), we can feel some assurance that harvesting a little for our family will still leave lots for other desert creatures and seeds for a future winter.

Silverbells isn’t spicy–no picante bite like the introduced London rocket or mature arugala–…and every above-ground part is flavorful —fresh right off the plant!

To my palate, its symmetrical little urn-shaped flowers even have a slight sweetness.,..

A taste of its flower can be like a communion.

Silverbells’ near-succulent leaf is a perfect addition tossed fresh in a salad. You can see the thickness of the juicy leaf in this cross-section view.

….And silverbells’ young green pods are delectably, “vegetally sweet.” Enjoy them fresh and raw, because, (alert!), with stir-frying the pods suddenly become bitter. They’re best used fresh to bedeck a salad.

Silverbells is a Brassica, that is, in the cole-family of highly nutritious vegetables. Besides in a fresh mixed salad, my favorite way to enjoy their nutrition (high Ca, vit.A and C, folates) is in a veggie stir-fry. I have added the greens last in this tofu stir-fry. Can you spot the silverbell flowers I topped this dish with?

Here’s another “weed”–my very favorite, but very rare–which my O’odham mentor showed me years ago–opon i:wagĭ. Known in Spanish as patota, and in English by the truly misleading term “poverty weed,” it only comes up in certain years with winter rains at just the right times and in right amounts. She led me to harvest in corrals and roadsides on the poorest soils, and there appeared these patches of flat-lying rosettes of small thick leaves, so unassuming. Not very noticeable but worth noticing!

This season, see if you can find some opon i:wagĭ out there in degraded sandy soils! It is easy to dig up the whole plant. Cut off its tap root and steam the little green spinach-like leaves. The best dish my teacher ever cooked for us was opon i:wagĭ fried with i’itoi’s onions in a little bacon drippings. I thank her in my heart for sharing her desert knowledge, to alert us to keep looking and watching for the next surprising desert rain-gifts.

Wild Rocket Risotto

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Have you seen an area like this recently?

Wonderful! Amy here, celebrating the yellow flowered wild mustards growing my yard and in the desert. Sisymbrium irio grows in dry, disturbed soil around the world but is orginally from the Middle East, southern Europe and northen Africa. One of its names, London Rocket, supposedly refers to how it uncharacteristically took over there after the Great Fire of 1666. (It loves disturbed soil, in my garden or elsewhere!) Arugula, another mustard family plant also known as rocket, has big white flowers and is actually classified as different genius.

Of course the leaves are edible and tender on the short, young basal rosettes. But the small leaves on the tall, flowering plants are suprisingly tender. The flavor of the leaves from mature plants is spicier, but I think it has more to do with the warming weather of the season as the plants mature. The seeds are edible too but are much smaller than commercial mustard seeds and are difficult to harvest.

Instead of triple washing, I like to wash once really well, where the wash water going to the garden. After swirling in plenty of water, I lift the leaves out of the water by hand and drain.

Wild rocket has countless possibilities in the kitchen. The leaves make a spicy salad or garnish on a sandwich, like arugula. My favorite way to enjoy it is wilted into a risotto. Homemade chicken broth (from the freezer) and a splash of wine make it special.

I start by browning rinsed aborio rice, onion and garlic in olive oil.

For traditional risotto with the creamiest texture, add hot broth a little at a time and stir constantly. For the easiest risotto, I just add plenty of broth and simmer slowly in a heavy pot with a lid. Three times the volume of liquid to rice is usually where I start.

When the rice is tender, I remove the pot from the heat and fold in the whole little leaves. Sprinkle with any cheese, in this case a dry and salty fresh goat cheese. Enjoy right away or at room temperature on a picnic.

Depending on temperature and moisture, we might be eating wild rocket for a couple more months into the spring. What other dishes do you like to make with wild rocket?

A Holiday Crackers Challenge!

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Have you noticed that a box of crackers is costing a whole lot more these days than it used to?–especially if you’re wanting specialized grains or herbed flavors? Why not “save” and make my own? Right! I’ve had a hankering for cracker flavors you just can’t find at the grocery, a lust for crackers made with our super-nutritious Southwest flours and herbs. So…fortified with locally-sourced materials, I searched cracker recipes to guide me, but I batted almost zero–so few recipes are out there. I took this dearth as a challenge. Tia Marta here to share some of my cracker experiments–and to challenge YOU to invent your own holiday crackers!

This is fun new territory. First with the goal of a gluten-free Southwest cracker, I took on Native blue cornmeal as the major delicious ingredient, with tapioca flour and chia seed as “binders”.

Recipe for Gluten-free BlueCorn-Amaranth-Chia Crackers:

Ingredients:

3/4 Cup blue corn meal (available from NativeSeedsSEARCH)

3/4 Cup tapioca flour

1/2 Cup amaranth flour 

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp sea salt (I used salt from Baja California)

2 Tbsp non-fat plain yogurt (Greek yogurt can be a no-fat substitute for butter)

3/4 Cup lowfat buttermilk

1 Tbsp. chia seed

1 Tbsp mesquite honey (optional, amaranth flour can be a little bitter) (or a generous glob of honey on a teaspoon)

You’ll need a greased pizza pan and a greased rolling pin.

Place half the dough in center of a greased pizza pan. With your fingers press the dough down and outward. Your goal is to create a thin 1/8″ layer of dough on the pan. Using a greased rolling pin, flatten the dough out from the center. Use fingers to push the the thinnest edges back to a uniform thickness, or edges will scorch in the baking. Carefully cut the thinned dough with a sharp knife into squares, and make holes with a fork to even the heat. Bake 8-10 minutes or until you see a toastiness. With a metal spatula, lift the hot crackers off the pan right away to cool.

Enjoy nutritious gluten-free BlueCorn-Amaranth crackers with thin slices of membrillo, or with a creamy cheese–a new taste treat with a hint of sweetness.

You’ll see more pictures of the cracker dough prep-process below.

Inspired by rosemary-flavored flatbreads, I decided to try making a rosemary mesquite cracker with local heirloom wheat. Our garden supplied the fresh rosemary to cut into edible bits…. This local combination came out great:

Recipe: ROSEMARY-MESQUITE-PIMACLUB WHEAT Crackers

Ingredients:

3/4 Cup barley flour

1/2 Cup Pima Club wheat flour (from Ramona Farms, Sacaton, AZ)

1/4 Cup mesquite pod flour (any more than this will become too strong a flavor)

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp fine sea salt (I used Sea of Cortez pilgrimage salt crystals collected by a friend)

1/4 Cup oat bran

2 Tbsp non-fat plain yogurt

1/2 to 1 Cup low-fat buttermilk

1/2 tsp glob of mesquite honey (optional)

Optional “topping” suggestions: 1/8 tsp additional, dry, finely chopped rosemary leaf; 1/8 tsp crystallized sea salt; 1/2 tsp barrel cactus seed or saguaro seed; 1/2 tsp popped amaranth seed; 1 Tbsp grated aged cheddar

You’ll need a greased pizza pan or baking sheet, and a greased rolling pin.

Directions (similar to previous recipe):

Preheat oven to 350F.  Pre-soak rosemary bits in buttermilk to enhance flavor.  Sift together all dry ingredients except the oat bran.  Add oat bran separately as it will not pass thru sifter easily.  Cut yogurt into dry ingredient mixture.  Add buttermilk mixture gradually until dough is firm–not liquidy.

Place half the dough in center of greased pan and roll outwards until very thin and even (approx 1/8″ thickness). Be sure to tuck edges back to be equal thickness as center.

Sprinkle top of thinned dough with your desired topping. Here I’ve used rosemary bits, crystals of sea salt, and a sprinkle of chia. Pat the “topping” into the dough with your fingers so it will stick when baked. For this batch I used a cookie cutter through the rolled dough to make round crackers.

With the other half of the dough I used a greased rectangular pan which confined the rolling pin action to only two directions. Here I formed the dough into a thin circle to make “pie” wedge crackers.

Bake 8-10 minutes and check to see that the crackers have crisped. With metal spatula lift them from pan immediately to cool.

These Rosemary-Mesquite-PimaClub Wheat crackers are savory and pair well with cream cheese and jam, or as a foundation for colorful holiday canapes.

Lots of work goes into making crackers! But if our wonderful local desert grains aren’t available as crackers commercially, this is the only way to go. I challenge you to give them a try–to experiment with your own local grain combos!

Crackers are best made in greater quantity–not piecemeal. I’ve had this vision of an Indigenous-owned and -operated enterprise, with ingredients sourced sustainably from the desert, someday filling this “cracker niche,” making good revenues and providing us all with nutritious, appropriate Southwest-flavored crackers….

Uncovering the Chocolate History of the Southwest

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Chocolate drinking vessels found in Pueblo Bonito.

It may seem a stretch to discuss chocolate in a blog on Southwest food. But chocolate has been in the area since the 9th century. It’s Carolyn writing today and as a chocolate addict, I find the history of chocolate in our area fascinating. In the late 1800s, rancher Richard Wetherill was poking around in Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon in the Four Corners area and excavated 111 cylinder jars. Archaeological technology has advanced greatly since then and researchers have dated the strata in which they were discovered to 1000 CE. Even more interesting, substances inside the jars and in pieces of broken jars indicate that the jars contained chocolate. Since the jars were all found in one room, scientists speculate that the chocolate was being used ritually. Archaeologist Dorothy Washburn also found residue that appears to be from chocolate in bowls from the site of Alkali Ridge, Utah, that date to 780 CE, even earlier.

Consider that the closest place chocolate was grown was 1,200 miles south in Mexico. This was before draft animals were used, so a trader or a series of traders carried chocolate all that way on their back, along with macaw feathers and copper bells.  With all that travelling, chocolate must have required quite a bit of turquoise and other goods in exchange.  

The Spanish Bring Chocolate to the Southwest

When the Spanish missionaries and soldiers came north to what we call the Southwest, they brought chocolate, one of their very few luxuries. Chocolate, being a New World crop, was much less expensive than tea, which had to come by a months-long trip across the Pacific Ocean from Asia. Their drink wasn’t the creamy concoction we now savor. Then chocolate was mixed with water and sometimes honey to sweeten it.

Father Phillip Segesser, one of the earliest priests at San Xavier Mission in Tucson, complained in a letter to his Swiss relatives that every non-Native visitor expected to be served chocolate. Father Segesser lived a very humble life, and he found this presumptuous. It is also interesting that provision orders from the day for both soldiers and priests listed both ordinary chocolate and fine chocolate, the later of which cost twice as much. We can guess what Segesser served his visitors.

During the 1781 Yuma uprising near modern day Yuma, Franciscan priest Fray Francisco Garces requested that he be allowed to finish drinking his chocolate before being beaten to death by the Quechans.

 I was happy in two recent trips to learn more about my obsession. In the large green house at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, I saw a cacao tree up close and was amazed to learn that the flowers grow right from the trunk.

 

Cacao tree in flower in the Atlanta Botanical Garden. See a small green chocolate pod in the upper right.

In Guatemala, I visited an artisanal chocolate maker. I got to see all aspects of converting a cacao bean into a chocolate bar, from opening the pod, to cleaning the beans, then roasting them on a comal before grinding them to a paste and adding sugar.

Just opened cacao pod. The seeds are inside the white covering.

Guatemalan artisan chocolate maker roasts cacao beans over coals.

 

The roasted beans are ground, combined with sugar, and formed into a patty. They are surprisingly oily. Perhaps patties like this were what the early traders brought to Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. 

Chocolate pairs so well with our  mesquite meal–a perfect blend of tropics and desert. These waffles will make a holiday breakfast treat.

Chocolate Mesquite Waffles

½ cup all-purpose flour

½ cup whole wheat flour

½ cup mesquite meal plus 1 tablespoon

3 tablespoons cocoa

1 tablespoon baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

2 egg yolks

1 ¼ cup milk of choice

½ cup oil

2 egg whites beaten stiff

In a large bowl, sift together dry ingredients. In a small bowl, combine egg yolk, milk and oil. Stir the wet mixture into the dry ingredients. Fold in egg white, leaving some fluffs. Do not over mix. Pour batter into hot waffle maker and follow manufacturer’s directions.

Makes about 8 waffles.

Recipe adapted from Eat Mesquite (2011) by Desert Harvesters

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You can learn more about the history of food in Southern Arizona in my latest book A Desert Feast, the story of the last 4,000 years of food in the Sonoran Desert. Want more recipes using  foods of the Southwest? You’d find ideas for collecting and using 23 easily recognized and gathered desert foods in Cooking the Wild Southwest: Delicious Recipes for Desert Foods.  . Recipes from top Southwest chefs are collected in The New Southwest Cookbook. Just click on the titles for more information. You can learn more about me on my website.

Elder Native Plant Medicine: Make Your Own Elderberry Syrup

/ Sister Emily / 2 Comments
Sambucus nigra fruit. Image credit Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz 

Elderberry (Sambucus nigra, synonymous with Sambucus mexicana) or tapiro in Spanish is a beautiful shrub that grows wild in many riparian places in the low desert of Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, or at higher elevations such as the sky islands of the Sonoran Desert and borderlands, in Europe, and beyond. In traditional/natural medicine, it has long been prized for its strong antioxidant qualities and is excellent for treating colds, coughs, and the flu. You can read many scientific studies like this Randomized Study on Influenza (Zakay-Rones Z, 2004) or Treatment of Upper Respiratory Symptoms (Hawkins, 2019) that have confirmed these benefits. The berries are not safe to eat raw or uncooked–but when cooked (at least 15 minutes to vaporize the harmful compounds), elderberry’s flavor is totally safe and naturally sweet.

Elderberry marmalade purchased in Magdalena, Sonora

Sister Emily here to share a popular immune-boosting syrup recipe made from this wonderful plant. I’ve harvested tapiro or elderberry from Tubac near the Santa Cruz River, on Mt. Lemmon in the Santa Catalina Islands, and near washes in the east side of Tucson. Also in Catalonia in Spain!

Dr. Wendy Hodgson’s excellent book “Food Plants of the Sonoran Desert” (pictured) describes the traditional uses of elderberry by the O’odham, Pima, Cahuilla, and Yavapai (Hodgson, 2001). Her research found that native people of the Sonoran Desert have always used elderberry fruits for food, medicine, and wine, and in some cases the flowers, too.

My Bulgarian musician friend says they prize the woody stems of elderberry for their long straight stems prized for making wood instruments.

Elderberry Syrup Recipe

I recommend keeping this delicious syrup medicine around all the time, or especially when the seasons change (to ward off colds and the flu).
Makes about 1 cup of finished syrup. (Ingredients can all be doubled for larger batches.)

Ingredients

  • 1 cup dried organic elderberries OR 2 cups fresh wild-harvested* elderberries, destemmed and rinsed.
  • 2 cups filtered water
  • 1/2 – 1 cup raw, local honey**, depending on amount of liquid. Meet your local beekeeper at a farmer’s market!

Optional Ingredients:

  • Herbs: 1/2-1 tsp. organic dried ground ginger, 1 stick of cinnamon, and/or a few cloves.
  • Brandy or vodka- some people add 1/2 cup of either of these alcohols to further preserve the syrup and increase shelf life

*For foragers, always use caution to ensure you have properly identified the elderberry plant (Sambucus nigra or Sambucus mexicana), which is relatively easy.
**Do not feed infants honey.

Instructions:

  1. Combine elderberries (and optional herbs) with cold water in pot and bring to a gentle boil.
  2. Reduce heat and allow to simmer 30 minutes.
  3. Turn off heat and allow to slowly cool and steep for at least half an hour.
  4. Strain to obtain the elderberry liquid into a measuring cup. To capture the most liquid, you can also use cheesecloth or mesh cloth and squeeze out as much as possible of the cooled liquid.
    Note: Don’t pitch those power-berries! The strained elderberries can be used as a immune-boosting topping for yogurt or oatmeal!
  5. Check the volume of the elderberry liquid. Check that you add honey in a ratio of half of this volume. (1 cup of elderberry liquid requires 0.5 cup of honey.) This will ensure that the syrup won’t spoil.
  6. Pour elderberry and honey back into the pot, and gently heat just enough to stir and incorporate the honey. (Heating honey too much will destroy valuable enzymes and beneficial antioxidants).
  7. Add optional brandy or vodka, if desired as an additional preservative.
  8. Pour into a clean glass jar and store in the refrigerator.
  9. Take a tablespoon (or two!) when you are feeling a little low or a bug creeping in, or just for a pick-me-up boost to the immune system. It’s also just a sweet treat.

Storage and Use:

This powerful syrup will keep 2-3 months or longer if stored in the refrigerator. I have also found my syrup to be stable (mold-free) for even longer, and tastes just fine! The natural preservative of honey is the key.

Want to make the syrup even easier? It’s hard to beat this very convenient complete Elderberry Syrup Kit from Tucson Herb Store on 4th Avenue in Tucson. Click to see this excellent option for purchase and included recipe by Ms. Amanda Brown.

References

Hodgson, Wendy C. Food Plants of the Sonoran Desert. University of Arizona Press, 2001. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv27jsm7t

Hawkins, Jessie, et al. “Black Elderberry (Sambucus Nigra) Supplementation Effectively Treats Upper Respiratory Symptoms: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized, Controlled Clinical Trials.” Complementary Therapies in Medicine, vol. 42, Feb. 2019, pp. 361–65. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ctim.2018.12.004.7/147323000403200205

Zakay-Rones Z, Thom E, Wollan T, Wadstein J. Randomized Study of the Efficacy and Safety of Oral Elderberry Extract in the Treatment of Influenza A and B Virus Infections. Journal of International Medical Research. 2004;32(2):132-140. doi:10.1177/147323000403200205

Pods to Meal to Cookies at home, TODAY!

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Hello friends, Amy here with a baked good I made last week. I wanted to bring treats to share with my friends, something we could nibble while we passed the break table. And if no one had to wash plates, forks or spoons, that was a bonus. My people truly delight in cooking, hadn’t had anything mesquite in ages, and I wanted to impress. After considering my options for a month, I suddenly realized… that’s this afternoon!!!

Drought makes for patchy harvesting, but I had a stash of pods. The trick to making HOME grinding work, especially in humid weather, is to toast the pods RIGHT before grinding. No community mesquite pod milling event near you? Need that mesquite meal TODAY? No problem!

I baked in a thin layer at about 275 degrees F with convection for maybe 5 minutes. Try longer if you don’t use or have a fan. It should smell sweeeeet. I opted to not develop any golden color, but that’s an option!

After cooling JUST enough to handle easily, I tossed the pods into a high powered blender. A regular blender or food process does not suffice. Without the last minute toasting, grinding makes a paste in there. This of course is an issue with any mesquite meal grinding method, but expecially for the blender or stone tools.

Unbelievablly, it only takes a few pulses.

Any fine sieve or a flour sifter can remove the meal form the hard bits of unground pod and seed. Any grinding method will require this step, even hammer mills.

Sifting is even faster than grinding, depending on the size of the holes and quanity of mesquite meal needed.

To show off this flour, I impulsively chose a simple recipe from this small out of print book. However, you can purchase the huge current edition!

Chocolate chip cookies! I had a half bag of chocolate chips and pecans on hand, and chocolate with mesquite is classic. In case my butter spent too much time in the freezer, I doubled the vanilla. No brown sugar in sight, but a gallon of mollassas to use up.

I love making my notes in hard copy cookbooks, and reading the kitchen culture from long gone relatives in their books. And the bookmarks that are labels from my friends’ gifted food creations are my kind of treasures.

I baked these chocolate chip oatmeal mesquite pecan cookies until just barely set, let them finish cooling in transit, and served them chewy with the chocolate still melted. I’m sure they would not tolerate stacking. Some were full sized, the others bit sized. None were leftover.

Happy autumn!

A Foraging Consciousness for Famine Times

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We aren’t alone. Living through this extended drought and awesome heat in the Sonoran Desert is a major feat for any creature out there–plant or animal–no matter how desert-adapted it may be! We are all feeling it. Difficult to imagine how creatures, like the long-lived desert tortoise, manage through the kind of intense drought we are experiencing.

Even in my back yard, my tended prickly pear, covered in buds and tender nopales last April, is ending this summer with tunas dropping before mature or devoured by cactus wrens, and pads chomped by packrats or ground squirrels.

Tia Marta here to share some thoughts about us humans harvesting from the wild. As I learned from my Tohono O’odham mentor, in earlier times Indigenous people had to suffer through lean times using the desert foods they’d stored from times of plenty. They knew sporatic seasonal productivity is the name of the game in the desert. Wise cultural tradition dictates that you harvest abundance when it happens, share your plenty, and store as much as possible against the expected lean times.

Very few native prickly pears have produced fruit this year in the Sonoran Desert, so as human desert harvesters I feel we must refrain this year, and consider the needs of our wild neighbors, the deer, javalina, cottontails, rodents, birds, etc who need what forage remains– far more than we do.

Instead, I suggest we go for an invasive! How about eating from the white lead tree, known as guaje in Mexico, huaxin by the Aztec in its region of origin? Its presence as an invader into the Sonoran Desert generates interesting controversy. The seeds contain an amino acid mimocine toxic for us mammals who have no rumen for digestion. However Guaje‘s young pods, when green, can be cooked in soups or in tacos, as cooking removes the toxicity. This small fast-growing tree has other positive attributes: It is used as great cattle fodder, provides stovewood fuel, erosion remediation, herbal medicine, and it adds soil nitrogen. Its profuse and often continued flowering makes it a good pollinator support. Caution: it IS an invasive species and, if let loose in our desert, could compromise our precious natives..

Guajes (Leucaena leucocephala) have been known and appreciated in Sonora, Mexico, for decades if not centuries. It is planted on the University of Arizona campus (see UA Arboretum) and is being researched as a potential future food plant for climate change by horticulturists at Mission Garden. I’m glad guaje volunteered in our yard from soil in a potted plant. It created a little grove of blessed shade for us, and bees have been abuzz over its puffs of cream-white flowers every spring.

I recently gathered a gallon bag of dry pods which yielded only 1/8 cup of small seed. They resemble flax seed. I soaked them to see if any were viable. About 1/3 of them swelled. When cooked for 15 minutes to remove mimosine, and drained, they proved nut-like and tasty. I’m adding them to my home-made bean dip. As a legume they will provide good protein in addition to texture and new flavor.

To go with the dip, I’m using a scant amount (a tablespoon per 8oz) of my conserved prickly pear juice, harvested and frozen August last year, with flavored fizzy, gingerale and a splash of mescal. With this dressed up punch, we’re sending a toast to all desert creatures out there! We hope they are benefitting from any prickly pear tunas that may be ripening in our hot, dry desert!

May we be conscious of all the plants and animals around us during these weather-stress times! For more ideas on local “famine foods” see SavorSister Carolyn’s post and Tia Marta’s post. For ideas of what we can grow in prep for more climate extremes, check out Ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan’s inspirational book Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land: Lessons from Desert Farmers on Adapting to Climate Uncertainty.

A colorful assortment of Tia Marta’s watercolor art-notecards depicting Southwest Native American heirloom foods can be found at the Mission Garden shop, or online at NativeSeeds/SEARCH.

Sonoran Summer Tacos with Nopales and Verdolagas

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It’s Carolyn today and I’m out in my garden to pick some delicious and healthy vegetables to bring you a season-spanning recipe. If your Ficus Indica prickly pear (the Mexican tall kind) sent out its leaves a little late this spring, you probably have a few smaller pads that are still tender enough to cook. Combine those with the purslane in your summer garden for a delicious vegetable side dish or taco filling.  If you don’t have your own cactus. you can always pick up some nopal pads at any Mexican grocery store. If you buy the kind already cleaned, you’ll need to use them right away as once they are scraped, they go bad quickly. We have previously discussed how to clean prickly pear pads here. 

We’ve also discussed purslane previously in this blog here, but I’ll copy the nutritional information because it is so important:

It’s sad but true that right now people are out in their yards pulling these plants out and tossing them in the garbage (or compost for the more enlightened). They should be tossing them in the wok  or frying pan (see recipe below.) Purslane provides six times more vitamin E than spinach and seven times more beta carotene than carrots. It’s also rich in vitamin C, magnesium, riboflavin, potassium and phosphorus. One cup of cooked purslane has 25 milligrams (20 percent of the recommended daily intake) of vitamin C.

Especially important to those of us eating a modern diet, purslane is very high in an essential omega-3 fatty acid called alpha-linolenic acid (ALA). Omega-3s are a class of polyunsaturated essential fatty acids. Your body cannot manufacture essential fatty acids, so you must get them from food. Certain fibers also help in controlling blood sugar.

If your aren’t familiar with purslane or verdolagas, here’s a closeup photo:

Here are all your ingredients for the tacos: (top) prickly pear leaves and purslane, (bottom) onion slices, garlic and poblano chile.


This is what the ingredients will look like cooked.

Sonoran Summer Tacos

2  2×4-inch prickly pear pads or equivalent

½ white or yellow onion

2 cloves garlic, minced (1 teaspoon)

2 tablespoons neutral vegetable oil

1 cup verdolaga (purslane), packed

1 roasted, peeled, cleaned Anaheim or poblano chile, cut into pieces

      (or 2 tablespoons chopped canned green chiles)

4 corn tortillas or small flour tortillas

2-4 tablespoons crumbled cotija cheese or cheese of choice

Using rubber gloves, clean the stickers from the prickly pear pads. Rinse and cut into pieces 2 inches by 1/8 inch (roughly the size of a wood matchstick.) Set aside.

Cut the onion into thin strands by cutting from the root to the stem (not crosswise). Add the oil to a heavy frying pan and begin sautéing the onion over low medium heat. You want it to cook slowly until soft and light brown. After about 10 minutes, add the garlic. While that is happening, you can prep the rest of the ingredients.

Cut the fresh chile into pieces about 1 inch by 1/8 inch. Chop the verdolagas (purslane) roughly. After 10-15 minutes when the onions are ready, stir in the greens and chile and continue to cook.

Coat a heavy frying pan with a light spray of oil and soften the tortillas. Divide the vegetables among the tortillas. Sprinkle with cheese and fold over.

Every recipe writer whether for a blog or cookbook, needs a taste tester. Is it good? Would you eat it again? Here is my taste tester who has eaten his way through five cookbooks and dozens of these blog posts over forty years.

Chief taste tester Ford Burkhart works his way through the Sonoran Summer Tacos for lunch. He gave them the thumbs up. 

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You can learn more about the history of food in Southern Arizona in my latest book A Desert Feast, the story of the last 4,000 years of food in the Sonoran Desert. Want more recipes using  foods of the Southwest? You’d find ideas for collecting and using 23 easily recognized and gathered desert foods in Cooking the Wild Southwest: Delicious Recipes for Desert Foods.  . Recipes from top Southwest chefs are collected in The New Southwest Cookbook. Just click on the titles for more information. You can learn more about me on my website.