It’s Saguaro Season

June 19, 2014June 19, 2014 / Savor Blog Partners / 3 Comments

Saguaro flowers and unripe fruit. Photo by Rael B.

Our fire has burned and the sun has gone down;

Our fire has burned and the sun has gone down.

Come together, following our ancient custom.

Sing for the liquor,

Delightfully sing.

This was the song that called the people of the Tohono O’odham villages together for the saguaro wine ceremony that followed the harvest. During the ceremony, they people invoked the intercession of a deity far away in a “rainhouse” full of wind, water and seeds in the hopes of hastening the storms.

This and many other songs were collected and translated by Ruth Murray Underhill, an early anthropologist who lived among what were then called the Papago in 1938. They appear in her book Singing for Power.

When I go saguaro gathering, I get up around 4:30 a.m. and aim to be out among the saguaros just at dawn. I am always joined by doves and other birds looking for their breakfast. Alone on the desert, I occasionally find myself talking to the saguaros. “So what have you got for me?” I ask. I might worry about my sanity, but I know others have felt the same way. The late desert chronicler Edward Abbey agreed, calling saguaros “planted people.”

Dove getting breakfast

My harvest

The orginal desert dwellers used a dead saguaro rib to push the fruits off the cactus. If you can’t find one, any long pole or a fruit picker will do. You can separate the fruit from the rind in the field or bring it home to clean. Each fruit comes with its own sharp-edged knife, like a natural can opener.

Opening a fruit with the calyx on the blossom end.

Sharp edge of the calyx can be used as a knife.

Once you have extracted the fruit, you can either dry it whole or separate it into the seeds and juice. This is a simple process. To your pan or bucket, add as much water as you have fruit. Let it sit, covered loosely for six to eight hours. Then plunge your hands in and break up the fruit. Strain off the juice. Boil to concentrate. If you want to make syrup from the concentrated juice, add half as much sugar as you have juice and boil until clear. Store in a clean glass jar in the refrigerator. It will usually keep for months.

So what are the options for the seeds. You can put them in any baked good, make pilaf or porridge or cookie filling. But an easy use is homemade crackers. Spread the wet seeds on a cookie sheet in the sun. There will be some white material left from the juice, but either blow it off or ignore it. I made these crackers in around a half hour. We are accustomed to eating commercial crackers that are very sweet and salty. So if you want a familiar flavor, use the higher amounts of salt and sugar.

Black Beauty Wafers

1/4 cup saguaro seeds

1 cup whole wheat flour

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 to 3/4 teaspoon salt

1-2 teasp0ons sugar

1/4 cup water

1 tablespooncider vinegar

1/4 cup vegetable oil

8 teaspoons whole saguaro seeds

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Grind the 1/4 cup saguaro seeds in a blender or coffee grinder. In a large bowl, combine seeds, flour, baking powder, salt and sugar. Add water, vinegar and oil and mix, stirring and kneading until a stiff dough forms.

Shape dough into two rolls, 6 inches long and 1 inch in diameter. Then slice each roll into eight wafers. Sprinkle some seeds on a flat surface, place one disk of dough on it, sprinkle some more seeds on top and roll with a rolling pin as thinly as you can. The thinner the cracker, the crisper they will be. The shapes will be irregular.

Form dough into log and divide into eight portions.

Roll out each portion of dough.

Transfer the crackers to an ungreased nonstick cookie sheet. If you have a regular metal pan, use a sheet of parchment paper. Bake in the preheated oven for just 5 to 7 minutes. Watch closely to ensure they do not burn.

You can serve with soup or salad. Or spread with a soft cheese.

Serve your Black Beauty Wafers with a crisp salad.

And when you eat your saguaro syrup or enjoy your Black Beauty Wafers, remember the words an elderly Tohono O’odham woman said to Ruth Underhill back in 1938:

“To you Whites, Elder brother gave wheat and peaches and grapes. To us, he gave the wild seeds and the cactus. Those are the good foods.”

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For more recipes using both saguaro fruit and seeds, consult Cooking the Wild Southwest: Delicious Recipes for Desert Plants. You can find a copy at Native Seeds SEARCH or order online here.

Wild Greens and Mole Enchiladas

June 16, 2014June 16, 2014 / Savor Blog Partners / 1 Comment

Hello, this is Amy Valdés Schwem, and I’m honored to be here with such esteemed plant and cooking women!

I love harvesting wild greens, but my day job is making mole as Mano Y Metate. Today I’m going to make enchiladas made with Mole Dulce and fill them with wild greens and summer squash. It won’t heat up the house, if you take the toaster oven outside! Enchiladas made with tomato sauce instead of chile are called entomatados, and those made with mole are enmoladas. So the menu can read: Enmoladas de Mole Dulce con Quelites y Calabacitas.

Quelites can refer to several unrelated wild greens, but to me they are wild amaranth greens, Amaranthus palmeri, also known as pigweed.

I grew up eating quelites with my maternal grandfather, and he knew no shame jumping fences to pick weeds. They make a few tiny black seeds, unlike its Mexican domesticated relatives that make enough blond seed to fill bulk bins at the health food store.

It is native to the southwest US and northwest Mexico, and its wild and domesticated relatives are enjoyed around the world both as a green and for its grain-like seed. It easily out-competes summer garden and field crops and is becoming resistant to glyposphate (Roundup). But you wouldn’t want to harvest from those over fertilized fields anyway, since it can absorb too much nitrate, making it unsafe for humans and animals. However, grown in native desert soil, they are safe and nutritious, high in vitamin A, vitamin C, and folate, among other vitamins and valuable minerals.

Some species and cultivars available at Native Seeds/SEARCH are used for dye and have red leaves, and some make a huge red inflorescence pretty enough to grow as an ornamental, even if the birds eat all the seed. I’ve never had much luck popping the seed I grew, but you can buy commercially popped seed, like miniature popped corn.

I just visited my closest community garden, Las Milpitas de Cottonwood, and found these beauties in the irrigated beds already in flower. If this was all I had, I would pick the smallest leaves from the stalks and use those.

Hopefully you find quelites before flowering, shorter than a foot tall. I found a few plants in my yard where other things get watered. Many more will sprout with the summer rains.

Last year I had so many from my Tucson Community Supported Agriculture share that I dried some, just like my great aunt Tia Lucy told me they used to do. I just plucked leaves from the stems and air dried them in the house. To use, I soaked in water overnight, then sauteed with the others. I’ll dry more this summer, for sure.

To prepare the fresh quelites, wash, chop tender stems and all, and saute with a little onion and garlic in oil. My grandfather always used bacon grease, so that’s what I did.

It’s also prime season for calabacitas, so use them if you don’t have any fresh or dried quelites. My grandfather also collected and cooked verdolagas for us, which would work here, too.

Calabacitas, sauteed with onion and garlic. This filling with mushrooms and queso fresco, inside mole dulce enchiladas, is my brother’s signature dish. Well, one of his signature dishes.

Now for the mole! For a half dozen enchiladas, to serve two people, I used about half of a tin of Mano Y Metate Mole Dulce powder, cooked in mild olive oil to make paste.

Then I added about half a cup homemade chicken stock and a dash of salt, but veggie stock is great, too. Water doesn’t quite do it. Simmer until you have a nice sauce, adding more broth as necessary. There will be steam and good smells.

The secret to enchiladas: start with thin corn tortillas and fry briefly in oil hot enough to sizzle, but not hot enough to make them crispy!!! DO NOT skip this step!

If the tortilla cooks too much, or if it breaks, just turn up the heat and make that one into a corn chip.

Dip the flexible tortilla in the mole dulce.

Put quelites or calabacitas in the tortilla and roll.

Top with homemade queso fresco and bake until heated though. My grandfather used the toaster oven outside on the patio in the summer to make enchiladas. No need to heat the house!

Depending on your oven, you may need to cover them with foil, but I didn’t. I like crispy edges. Serve with a cucumber, tomato salad dressed with a squeeze of lime, beans, and prickly pear grapefruit-ade.

Leftovers are best fried in a cast iron pan until crispy.

Mano Y Metate moles can be purchased from Martha Burgess of Flor de Mayo Arts at the Sunday Heirloom Farmers’ Market at St. Philip’s Plaza, Native Seeds/SEARCH, and ManoYMetate.com.

Limoncillo

March 28, 2014February 10, 2015 / Savor Blog Partners / 1 Comment

Savor Sister Jacqueline Soule posting today.

Chinchweed or limoncillo is known to scientists as Pectis papposa, a member of the Compositae family, now called the Asteraceae, and arguably the largest plant family out there. If you aren’t “into” the Compositae, it is generally considered just another one of those DYC’s (Dratted Yellow Compositae). (Well, we scientists don’t say “dratted” but we don’t want the parental controls to censor this blog.)

Pectis papposa is just a “DYC” to some, but it can be so much more!

This sprightly summer blooming annual is found across the desert Southwest from New Mexico to California and northern Mexico (in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts) at elevations below 6000 feet. With surprising promptness after the first summer rain, the desert floor is carpeted with the small yet bright yellow flowers – DYC’s.

A carpet of Pectis papposa. Too lovely to trod upon!

Hopi, Zuni, and Havasupai all use the chinchweed plant as a condiment, especially to flavor meat. There are also references to its use as a fresh green and potherb. In Mexican markets, bundles of fresh or dried plants are sold as limoncillo and used as a culinary spice, generally to flavor meat. There are also references to its use as a dye plant.

The leaves of limoncillo are dotted with a number of glands filled with flavorful oils.

Planting and Care.
Sow seeds of this charming summer annual anywhere in your yard you wish them. Plants look especially lovely in a cactus garden, and appear to prefer well drained soil. Since chinchweed is a summer annual, sow in the warmer months, from April onward. Ideally have the seeds in the soil prior to the first monsoon rain, generally around San Juan’s Day or summer solstice. This may be tough as seeds are generally not available in seed catalogs. You may have to wild collect some of the herb this year, and while you are at it, collect seeds for your own next year. Once you have some limoncillo your yard it seems to cheerfully find new places to tuck itself, including in areas of reflected light, which is often a tough site for plants to thrive in.

These tiny plants will find their way into unexplored corners of you yard. A weed only by common name, the seed is excellent food for native birds.

Harvesting and Use.
As a culinary spice, chinchweed may be used fresh or dried. Simply chop up the fresh material or crumble the dried and sprinkle on meat. If you like lemony chicken, then limoncillo is a great local herb to use! Fresh cinchweed greens add a nice zing to stir fry, but I have not tried them cooked alone as a potherb (yet). This will be part of my New Years resolution to grow and use all of the native plants in my Father Kino’s Herbs book (More on this at 30 minutes in on America’s Web Radio – http://www.americaswebradio.com/podcasts/VeggieHourJan18.2014.mp3). For dye, pluck the flower heads off and use them fresh or dried. I could not find if there was a specific mordant.

Harvest the flower heads for dye and the leaves together with the flowers for culinary use.

Now I have thought of a new way to think of this DYC – it’s a Delightfully Yummy Compositae! And I hope you will consider some for your yard.

DYC stands for Delightfully Yummy Composite with Darling Yellow Crowns!

[For another species of DYC flowering now, and some of its uses, please visit my blog on Native Plants & Wildlife Gardens – http://nativeplantwildlifegarden.com/brittle-bush-in-bloom/]

The information presented here is a sample of what appears in my book Father Kino’s Herbs, Growing and Using Them Today (Tierra del Sol Press, 2011). Available through amazon.com. Free public lectures on growing and using our wonderful native plants, at a number of branches of the Pima County Library.

Photos copyright free and courtesy of Wikimedia except where noted. Article © 2014, Jacqueline Soule. All rights reserved. I have received many requests to reprint my work. My policy is that you are free to use a very short excerpt which must give proper credit to the author, and must include a link back to the original post on our site. My photos may not be used. Please use the contact me if you have any questions.

How Nopales Become Nopalitos

March 23, 2014 / Savor Blog Partners / 1 Comment

Pick prickly pear pads when they are the size of your hand.

Pick new prickly pear pads in the spring when they are the size of your hand.

Carolyn Niethammer with you this week. In our last post, Martha Burgess wrote about how early cholla buds were appearing this year. I have seen pads beginning to form on the native prickly pear, but not yet on my Ficus Indica, the tall Mexican variety. But they will be out soon, so let’s talk about how to prepare them for use in salads and casseroles.

Scape off the stickers with a serrated steak knife.

First thing is to don your rubber gloves. Even though these cactus pads don’t have large stickers, they do have the tiny glochids that can be awful to get out of your hands. Then using an old-fashioned steak knife with a serrated edge, go against the grain to scrape off the stickers. Keep a paper towel nearby to clean the knife and keep your working surface clean.

Trim off the edge.

There are an abundance of stickers on the edge of the pad, so just trim it off and discard it.

The nopal becomes nopalitos.

At this point you can put the whole, cleaned nopal on the grill next to some chicken pieces or pork chops. Or you can chop the pad into smallish pieces. The Chicago restaurant owner, TV star and author Rick Bayless coats the pieces with oil, puts them on a cookie sheet and bakes until done. You can also do it in a frying pan. Cook until the color changes to a more olive hue. The slippery substance that is so healthy for your blood will dry up and become less noticeable.

Cook nopalitos until they turn olive colred and loose some of their moisture.

I watched my friend Amy Valdez Schwemm do a nopal cooking demo at the Mercado last year. Her method is a little different. After cleaning the nopal, she cooks it whole and cuts it up later. If you are cooking in a frying pan, this eliminates having to flip each piece individually.

Amy cooks the pads whole then cuts later.

At this point you can add to a salad (maybe picnic-style potato salad) or a casserole such as this one with lentils from my cookbook Cooking the Wild Southwest.

French Green Lentils with Nopalitos

Although prickly pear is a New World plant, it has spread over the globe. The Spaniards originally took it back to Europe from Mexico. I was fascinated to learn that it has colonized in Ethiopia in a big way. Some impoverished groups live on the prickly pear fruits for months when they are ripe. But people do not eat the pads there, although they feed them to their livestock. Here are some photos my friend Seyoum took showing prickly pear and his family in Irob, Ethiopia.

A very large prickly pear plant in Irob, Ethiopia.

Preparing nopales for the livestock.

All prickly pear pads are edible; it just depends on how much time you want to spend getting the stickers off. I usually wait until the Ficus Indica pads develop. Those with access to a Mexico grocery store can usually find them there, sometimes already cleaned. Once they are cleaned, they tend to deteriorate quickly, so buy just before you want to cook them. The very best tasting prickly pear pads I’ve ever eaten are grown on the foggy slopes of central California by John Dicus at Rivenrock Gardens. You can find him at http://www.rivenrock.com. He will go in the morning and pick you a boxful and it will be on your porch the next day. They are so fresh, they will last for many weeks in the refrigerator. He grows a variety he found in Maya country in Mexico and they are virtually spineless. And delicious!

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Excited to try prickly pear? I give you lots of recipes in The Prickly Pear Cookbook and Cooking the Wild Southwest. Very helpful for controlling blood sugar and cholesterol.

Wondrous Weeds!

February 14, 2014 / Savor Blog Partners / 5 Comments

Tia Marta here to share ideas about our new neighbors—the weedy greens popping up all around us. With those fall rains we had here in the low desert, there is a bloomin’ haze of green on the desert floor– not what you’d call a florid show—but wait—what is happening where November’s mud-puddles were collecting? That may be real food lurking in your own backyard! Now is prime time to take advantage of spontaneous tender mercies and phytonutrients. Interesting tastes await us, to spice up our salads and bedeck our burritos.

“Wild arugula” or London rocket (Sisymbrium irio) provides zesty greens, flower garnish, and later, mustard seeds when mature. (MABurgess photo)

London rocket (read “wild arugula”) is everywhere, its greenery literally growing before our eyes in every low swale, rocky hillside, every ditch where water has run. Sisymbrium irio is an introduced weed which we can enjoy with impunity—the more we eat of them the more we are removing competition for our beloved native plants. So harvest away! (A good rule of thumb is to collect at least 50’ from a road. No need to ingest road dust and pollutants when there is so much to be found in friendly yards or out in the des.)

Prepare for a picante treat, sometimes a picante bite, from these wild mustards. Toss a few wild arugula leaves with baby greens, or in a BLT to liven it up. Try them steamed with your favorite garden greens or added to stir-fry.

Hot February weather is telling our wild mustards, “Summer’s coming. Better go ahead and bloom fast!” Already we see tiny 4-petaled yellow flowers rising from the rosettes of deeply lobed leaves. Small erect spikelets of seedpods (called siliques) stand out from the central stem. Whole flower heads with seedpods are edible, and zingingly picante. Sooner than we think, seedheads will mature and you can harvest their tiny mustard seeds for dressings or salad sprinkles.

This year, if you spy Lesquerella gordoni (bladderpod), it will stand out like little yellow stars on the bare ground. (MABurgess photo)

In some wet winters, a different native mustard known as bladderpod has made carpets of lemon-yellow flowers on the desert floor. No such show this year. Should you find a patch of blooming bladderpod, try a taste of its petals. Their nice nip will add vivid color, nutrition, and excitement to any salad, garni, or burrito topping.

Better known as tumbleweed, Russian thistle (Salsola kali) is best harvested in this tender stage—and every rancher will thank you for your service! (MABurgess photo)

The most ubiquitous of weeds is the introduced Russian thistle which no one seems to notice until it dries, dislodges, tumbles across the road on a crosswind, and stacks up next to a fence or obstacle. So now, while it is in its infancy, go out to that windbreak and find its progeny! Have no compunction about snipping it at ground level while it is only inches high, young, and tender—before sharp stems develop making it unpalatable to humanoids. You will be amazed at what it adds, snipped in short pieces fresh in a salad, steamed with butter and pepper, or stir-fried with other veggies.

Our many species of saltbush (Atriplex spp.) are tender and ready for picking in late winter into spring. (MABurgess photo)

Find saltbush’s gray greenery along the Santa Cruz floodplain–or plant it in your yard for wildlife habitat. (MABurgess photo)

Now is saltbush’s time to shine—in landscaping and in cuisine. Here in Baja Arizona there are many species of Atriplex, and all are edible. These tough shrubs are desert survivors for sure. They tend to grow in “waste places” where hardly any other plants can make it. The name saltbush indicates its habitat, where soil is salty,heavy, or full of caliche. Quail and other creatures find refuge and forage in the dense shrubs. If you want to attract birds into your yard, go to Desert Survivors Nursery, Tucson, and buy any saltbush to plant—then stand back. We humans can join in the saltbush foraging guiltlessly, as saltbush is plentiful and our harvesting may even stimulate re- growth.

Nearly every Native nation in the Southwest has a tradition of using saltbush in multiple ways. When its stiff salty leaves are youthful they can be picked for cooking with other greens, the style of traditional Akimel O’odham, the River Pima. My Tohono O’odham teacher Juanita would steam saltbush with cholla buds, and told me how “the old people would roast their cholla buds in layered beds of ontk i:wagi [salt spinach].” Hopi cooks make a kind of baking powder out of pulverized saltbush foliage.

Try young saltbush leaves cooked with heirloom cannelini beans or cranberry beans—for a flavorful variation on beans-and-greens. You’ll find that the salts which the plants have sequestered from the soil will add a delicious desert flavoring. Move over, Hawaiian sea-salt! (After saltbushes have flowered, we will “talk seeds”—stay tuned….)

NativeSeeds/SEARCH (www.nativeseeds.org) and Mission Garden (www.tucsonsbirthplace.org) carry seed of a domestic relative of saltbush called “orache” which provides a purple-leafed “green” for a winter veggie garden.

Did you ever contemplate cheeseweed thru the day? (Are you kidding?) Its palmate leaf is a sun-tracker! I discovered these young Malva neglecta in late afternoon with each leaf bent westerly, cupped, facing the setting sun.(MABurgess photo)

Ah, cheeseweed—the “scourge” of gardeners, when it gets established. Malva or cheeseweed, so called for its cheese-wheel shaped seed pod, is another one of those introduced weeds which tend to follow humans. Only harvestable when young– get it while you can. You’ll find it in disturbed flat areas where stock or off-roaders have churned up the natural soil, along fencelines or untended sidewalk margins. Beware, cheeseweed seems to be sought-after by wandering dogs as a “marker plant” so wash your harvest well.

New Malva foliage can make a nutritious addition to steamed collards, kale, acelgas, or turnip tops; or stir-fried with peppers, onion, and slices of winter squash. If you want to explore Malva’s medicinal qualities, try the foliage steeped as a tea for soothing tender digestive tract tissue or urinary tract. It makes a healing topical poultice as well.

Life-giving weeds are all around us, especially now with their ju-ju rising. Really no one need be hungry here. We’d all be healthier if we were eating more of these spontaneous gifts brought by Nature and human mobility. My respect for weeds and knowledge of their goodness outweighs my frustration as I pull them from my garden. Here’s wishing you happy weed harvesting, a new way of enjoying the pulses of life in the desert!

If you are lucky enough to locate Carolyn Niethammer’s book Tumbleweed Gourmet, Univ. of AZ Press, 1987, grab it! Find more info about traditional uses of saltbush in Food Plants of the Sonoran Desert by Wendy Hodgson, Univ. of AZ Press, 2001. Find medicinal uses of Malva neglecta in Medicinal Plants of the Desert and Canyon West, Mus. of NewMexico Press, 1989. Mission Garden is open on Saturday afternoons for guided tours, and NativeSeeds/SEARCH store at 3061 N Campbell Ave, Tucson, is open daily 10am-5pm.

Visit me, Tia Marta, for more weedy ideas and heirloom beans galore at the Flor de Mayo booth, St Phillips Farmers Market on Sundays 9am-1pm. (www.flordemayoarts.com).

Decorate Using Your Southwestern Yard

December 20, 2013December 13, 2018 / Savor Blog Partners / 1 Comment

Holiday time again. Many people stress out, wanting everything to be perfect. Others stress out due to family interactions — old and new. Almost everyone overspends their budget, another source of stress. It’s easy to tell yourself that you are going to be relaxed this year, but far harder to do it.

Numerous studies demonstrate that the relaxation process is helped by connecting to the natural world. This is great news for us living here in the sunny southwest. Take a sanity break in your own back yard, and ideally, bring some of the nature outside into your home.

Fill a vase with evergreen boughs. Prune your evergreens, or volunteer to do those of a neighbor. Pines such as Aleppo and Afghan pines are commonly sold as living Christmas trees and make lovely yard trees. They typically need little pruning (one of their attractions as a yard tree), but you may be able to find some branches that need trimming. Stores that sell fresh Christmas trees may let you have some trimmed boughs to decorate with.

There are a number of other evergreen cousins. Trees and shrubs commonly called cypress, cedar and juniper were all typically planted in older neighborhoods. All will last a week or so in a vase. Try to find branches with the bright blue “berries.” Actually the “berries” are tiny cones, and the seeds inside are well loved by many local birds.

Greens don’t have to be traditional holiday evergreens either. Technically, any plant that does not drop its leaves is an evergreen. Rosemary is evergreen, and it is related to mint. Citrus trees are evergreen, and make lovely additions to indoor arrangements. Pyracantha doesn’t lose it’s leaves in winter and is adorned with bright reddish berries right now. Nandina, also called heavenly bamboo has red berries and green leaves as well. The Texas mountain laurel tree is evergreen with silvery seed pods. One of my favorites to bring indoors is boughs of our native creosote bush. All of these will last at least a week in a vase and look very festive.

Yule logs are a British Isles tradition. A mesquite log can take the place of a Christmas tree. Glitter can be sprinkled into the bark crevices. Use a drill to bore several holes for candles. Decorate with evergreens and bows. If you want to be traditional, the Yule log is burned on Epiphany, January 6th, or in an older tradition, on the Winter Solstice, December 21st. Do not burn the evergreens when it is time to light your Yule log. The evergreens are full of highly volatile oils and can cause a house fire instead.

Above all, remember to relax and enjoy the season. Old expectations may rattle their chains and try to haunt you, but take it easy, and take it slow. Surround yourself with as much as possible with the natural world. When you start to feel stressed, take a deep breath, and rest and refresh your eyes and spirit with the beauty of nature.

If you would like help with care and planting of your yard, I work as a “Garden Coach” helping you get the most out of your yard. Please contact me, Jacqueline, at 909-3474. Feel free to leave a voice message.

Prickly Pear Sparkles in Holiday Cocktails

December 19, 2013December 19, 2013 / Savor Blog Partners / Leave a comment

Welcome guests with tasty prickly pear cocktails.

It’s Carolyn Niethammer here this week. First, I want to welcome all the new subscribers. I speak for my fellow bloggers when I say we are so happy to have you join this little community of food lovers. Please feel free to join in at any time with ideas and comments.

Today I want to talk about using prickly pear syrup in holiday cocktails. We all know and love prickly pear margaritas, but there is a world beyond that beloved beverage. And these cocktails don’t have to include alcohol. In fact it is nice to be able to offer your non-drinking guests something tasty and sophisticated way beyond diet coke and seltzer with lime.

There are several keys to delicious cocktails. One important ingredient is fresh juice. It makes a big difference and here in Arizona we have an easy abundance. Some of you need only walk as far as your backyard to grab a handful of oranges or tangelos. If you are using alcohol, you can choose vodka, tequila or rum.

Make your prickly pear syrup.

If you have stored some prickly pear juice in your freezer, make a syrup with 1 cup juice to 1 cup sugar. Simmer gently to evaporate some of the liquid. If you didn’t get around to storing any juice this year, there are several good commercial syrups made by local entrepreneurs. You can find Cheri’s Desert Harvest products widely in stores or on-line and Jeau Allen is at farmer’s markets with her products and they are available on-line.

You can buy commerical syrup and a special prickly pear/lime blend.

To elevate your cocktail with a more sophisticated flavor, you need to add a bitter or sharp flavor such as you get with ginger. To make ginger syrup, I grate a 5-inch piece of fresh ginger and simmer for 30 minutes in a cup of water. Strain out ginger and reduce liquid to a half cup. Add a half cup sugar or agave syrup and cook a few minutes to dissolve sugar. You can also add a few drops of bitters. Angostera bitters is the most available brand and they hold their recipe closely, but bitters is usually a blend of herbs and spices. You can find some recipes to make your own here and here.

As a final step, top each glass with a little flavored sparkling soda.

Here are some recipes to get you started. Then experiment.

Arizona Sunset

Fill glass with ice. Pour 3/4 full of fresh orange juice. Add a shot of tequila or rum and a tablespoon of ginger syrup. Add two tablespoons of prickly pear syrup. It will sink to the bottom and look like one of our gorgeous sunsets (see picture at top of blog).

Sombrero

1/2 cup pineapple juice

1 ounce rum

1/2 ounce Triple Sec

5 drops bitters

1 ounce prickly pear syrup

1/2 cup crushed ice

Combine all in a blender and serve in a glass with a swizzle stick speared onto a chunk of pineapple.

Carolyn’s Christmas Cocktail

2 ounces fresh orange juice

2 ounce fresh lime juice

1 ounce prickly pear syrup

1/2 ounce ginger syrup

2 ounces cranberry sparkling soda

Combine first four ingredients and pour over ice in large wine glass. Top with cranberry soda. Garnish with lime wedge or circle on glass edge.

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Want more prickly pear recipes? Take at look at The Prickly Pear Cookbook. Available at Native Seeds Search, The Tucson Botanical Gardens, your local bookstore or on-line here.

Seasonal Flavors and Scents of the Southwest Spice Up the Holidays

November 29, 2013November 30, 2013 / Savor Blog Partners / 1 Comment

Wake Up Holiday Salads With Chiltepines!

Contributed by Tia Linda

Chiltepines add zip to holiday salads.

The red, round fruits of the ancient chiltepin are making a comeback this year, after a rough bout with erratic weather patterns. This is “their” time of year, as they mature between October and December, giving us just enough time to dry them for use throughout the holidays. Marinated Kale Salad is easy to make, and offers a fresh, raw energy to the heavy-ish meals often served at the holidays. Prepare it the night before you wish to serve it, to give the juices of the lemon and tomatoes time to work their magic and soften the raw kale.

Here’s the recipe: In a bowl, combine 3 bright red chiltepin (crushed), 3 medium tomatoes (diced), the juice of 5 lemons, about half a cup of olive oil, and salt to taste. Then chop about 5 cups of raw Kale (also grows in your garden this time of year, here in the SW) as finely as you wish and add it to the mixture. Place it in some kind of container with a tight fitting lid so that you can periodically shake the green mixture, allowing the juices that inevitably fall to the bottom of the container the chance to coat the kale above.

Kale salad lightens heavy holiday meals.

Make a Sonoran Scents Pomander

Contributed by Jacqueline Soule

Pomanders are used to add fragrance to stored clothing while they are said to also deter moths. Pomanders have traditionally been made by sticking cloves into oranges, or mixing cinnamon and nutmeg with applesauce. For those of you that love the scent of creosote bush, here is a Sonoran Pomander recipe I invented.

Dry creosote leaves until well dried.

Dry leaves of creosote bush. Collect more than you think you need!

Turn them into leaf “powder” in a blender. Mix three parts leaf powder to one part applesauce.

Mix powdered leaves with applesauce.

Form into walnut sized balls, or pat into thick disks. If you get the mix too wet and have no more leaf powder, use a mild spice (like nutmeg) to add more “powder.” Don’t use something moths eat, like flour or mesquite meal.

You can use nutmeg if you run out of powdered leaves.

Use small cookie cutters to make impressions if you wish.

Add ribbon if you wish to hang them (later!). Poke ribbon into the center with a toothpick.
Allow to dry for three to seven days.

Insert ribbon into still moist pomander with a toothpick.

Notes:
* Substitute white glue for some or all of the applesauce.
* Hang one of these in your car and carry the desert with you as you drive!

* To learn how to grow creosote in your yard, visit my other blog on creosote, available on http://nativeplantwildlifegarden.com/lovely-larrea/

* You can also read more about using creosote bush (and other native herbs) in my book Father Kino’s Herbs: Growing and Using them Today (available at amazon.com).

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