wild food

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….

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.

Gathering the Desert, and Gathering Around Honey Wine

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Honey Wine with Saguaro Fruit, Summer Solstice 2025

Honey, the golden elixir of the bees, is famous for its impressive shelf stability, or resistance to spoiling. By its nature, it can remain edible for an extraordinarily long time. In grade school, I remember delighting in the fact that archaeologists found honey in King Tutankhamun’s 3,000 year old tomb. Cave paintings in Africa dated to thousands of years ago depict honey hunters who braved a defensive colony of bees (Hollmann 2015) to access the calorically valuable, medicinal, and tantalizing substance which could be consumed or stored long term. 

I love to think about the early honey harvesters of Africa and imagine the first time someone combined honey with water, and fermentation soon began–an exciting transformation took place! This is thanks to the action of microbes (as is commonly the case, at least with fermented foods). While humans crave the complex sweetness of honey, it turns out that honey is a favorite food of some microbes such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a species of yeast. The yeast consume the honey and convert it to alcohols and carbon dioxide. 

Honey wine, T’ej…sweet and warm like the solstice evening light.

It is thought that honey wine known as t’ej (say: “tedge”, with a soft d) originated in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and upwards of 5 million people consume t’ej on a daily basis (Belay n.d.). However honey wine variations are found in many parts of the world including Mexico and Poland (Katz 2012). You may know t’ej by its other name of mead, an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey with water. It is truly simple and fun to make t’ej at home by adding raw unpasteurized honey (which contains natural yeasts that kickstart fermentation) with pure water, but you can also add an endless variety of edible botanicals like herbs and fruit to create a unique or medicinal mead. While mead can be aged for months, you can drink it “young” after only a couple weeks of high-energy fermentation. What kinds of honey wine will you make to share with family and friends?

I was inspired to make t’ej for the first time by my friend Andrias Asnakew, a Tucsonan of Ethiopian descent who established Brillé Mead Company here in 2023. I was honored to share homemade t’ej with him and his welcoming friends who hosted us on Easter, clinking glasses as they described the traditional recipe. They taught me that East African t’ej is traditionally made with honey, water, and the leaves of gesho (Latin name Rhamnus prinoides, a plant native to southern and eastern Africa) which adds a distinct bitter flavor and wild yeast to start the brew (Belay, n.d.). I am grateful for the family’s hospitality and generosity, and to Andrias whose knowledge guided me through the process.

Friends gathering with traditional t’ej (Ethiopean honey wine).

Around the time I was pondering which ingredient to include in my first mead, I was marveling at the crowns of white trumpeting blossoms on the haṡan (Tohono O’odham name for the native saguaro cacti). I wondered what saguaro fruit honey wine would taste like? It seemed that using fresh red bahidaj saguaro fruit would be a perfect way to celebrate the solstice on June 20th, and to harken for rain on Dia de San Juan on June 24th. (For more on saguaro traditions, enjoy reading about the Tohono O’odham’s beloved bahidaj saguaro fruit from teacher Muffin, known as Sister Marta here at Savor the Southwest blog: Summer Solstice, and Sister Carolyn’s It’s Saguaro Season.). This mead would be fully Sonoran desert, made from local honey and saguaro fruit…

Bahidaj (Tohono O’odham for saguaro fruit), June 2025

I am glad to report that my first batch of honey wine/mead/t’ej was a happy success (recipe to follow) with very little cost and effort. The tasters gave feedback that the flavor is more dynamic than they expected, with real body and interest. There’s a bit of liveliness, but it’s not bubbly. Many folks commented on its balance: a little citrusy, and not too sweet; a light fruitiness, and warmth from the honey. There is a pleasant yeastiness like fresh bread, though it doesn’t taste strongly of alcohol. We all noted the way it gently, pleasantly nudges you toward relaxation (I estimate the percent alcohol of my brew 4.5-5% ABV). If you prefer a stronger t’ej, you can increase the amount of honey, or a lighter less alcoholic brew can be made using less honey. 

The recipe is so flexible and invites endless experimentation. The ratio of honey to water is anywhere from 1:4 (one part honey added to four parts water) to 1:16 (for a very light mead, or if you’re adding a lot of sweet fruit also). The variety of creative optional additions is endless: fresh or dried fruit (berries, native fruits encouraged), herbs (lemon balm, rose, mint) or spices (ginger, cardamom, cloves, or cinnamon). Take notes of your selection, process, and quantities. Andrias started experimenting with different flavors: strawberry, carkeda (hibiscus), habañero. It is a natural beverage; you know exactly what went into it when you make it yourself.

Recipe for Honey Wine (T’ej or Mead)

This recipe was adapted from Sandor Elix Katz’s excellent book, The Art of Fermentation, with inspiration and guidance from Ethiopian t’ej maker Andrias Asnakew (Tucson, Arizona). 

This recipe yields about 2+ gallons mead (can be scaled), potentially 4-5% alcohol, approximately (a hydrometer can measure this precisely if you wish)

1 quart local raw honey (32 ounces)– my personal favorite is Tucson Honey Company from Tucson local farmer’s markets.  
2 gallons+ pure, filtered water (~260 ounces) (if tap water is the only option, see below**) 
~1 cup raisins, optional but recommended to feed the yeast–added a little at a time.
Optional ½ teaspoon mead yeast (such as strain EC-1118. Check your local brew shop or find online).
Optional fresh or dried fruit (local and native fruits encouraged), herbs or spices. Experiment with quantity: a few cups of fresh fruit, or maybe around one cup if of dried herbs. For spices, try a handful or so and see how it goes. 

Ripe saguaro fruit

1. Clean a ~2.5 gallon fermentation vessel (ideally glass or stainless steel, but food grade plastic works). Wide mouth is best. 

2. Pour the honey into the vessel, and add about half the water. Stir stir stir till it dissolves, then add the rest of the water, leaving just a few inches at the top for bubbles and stirring. Cover with a cloth or loose lid, and place on a baking sheet to catch any drips. Add optional yeast, and optional fruit or herbs/spices.

Dissolve honey in pure water to start the fermentation process.

3. This is Day 0. Leave in a cool spot in the house where you’ll walk by frequently. I keep a long stirring spoon next to the vessel and stir it often, daily (at least two or three times+ daily). This introduces air for the yeast. Sandor Katz recommends we stir a few revolutions, then reverse the stir quickly to introduce air (biodynamic style!). Delight in the bubbles and give your greetings to the millions of hungry microbes hard at work! 

Full quantity of water mixed with honey. Ready to ferment!

4. After a few days of frequent stirring, you should start to see more and more bubbles when you stir. The yeast is waking up. This is Day 3. Add a palmful of raisins (a special ingredient by Andrias- he says it provides food to the yeast!) (This is the point when I harvested and added ripe fresh saguaro fruit, but it can be added at the beginning, too.)

Red saguaro fruit has been added to the bubbling brew.

5. Continue stirring multiple times per day. On Day 5 or 6, add another palmful of raisins, and again at Day 8-9. 

6. At about Day 10-12, the bubbles will begin to reduce in number and fervor. The yeast quickly consume and ferment most of the natural glucose in the honey, producing the alcohol and delicious brew. (The natural fructose takes longer to ferment and only does so if you age your mead for weeks and months.)

Frothy bubbles of active yeast activity!

7. Taste the mead. If it is too sweet for your liking, you can continue to stir and ferment a bit longer to “dry it out”. If you prefer more sweetness, Andras suggests you can “back sweeten” (add a bit of honey) to taste if desired, ideally a day prior to drinking it. 

8. Strain out any fruit, and serve at room temperature or chilled. Try both! The typical serving vessel for t’ej is a narrow-necked bottle called a berele.

The best way to enjoy your homemade honey wine is with friends, of course. I bet that you’ll pique curiosities about your brewing methods and newfound skill, and bring smiles to everyone’s face. Andrias thoughtfully shared that “you can tell from the smile that the food or drink is good”.

Honey Wine with Saguaro Fruit, Summer Solstice 2025

In Appreciation: 

Thank you to my teachers, including the bahidaj (saguaros), for their ongoing generosity and cultivation of our minds and hearts. 

Thanks to my new friends Andrias and incredible hosts Tilahun and his wife Kidist who are sharing their culture from Ethiopia with all of us in Tucson, Arizona.

Thanks to my mother Judith for kindly copy editing.

—

**To remove chlorine from the water simply draw the necessary amount of water and leave it out overnight. The chlorine will naturally evaporate from the open vessel. 


Bibliography

Belay, T. B. (n.d.). Call for access and benefit sharing of Rhamnus prinoides (Gesho). Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute, Genetic Resource Access and Benefit Sharing Directorate.

Jeremy C. Hollmann (2015): Bees, honey and brood: southern African hunter-gatherer rock paintings of bees and bees’ nests, uKhahlamba- Drakensberg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, DOI: 10.1080/0067270X.2015.1079378

Katz, S. E., The Art of Fermentation: An In-depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012.

GET READY FOR NOPALITO SEASON

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Grilled Chicken with Nopalito and Pineapple Salsa

Grilled Chicken with Nopalito and Pineapple Salsa (from The Prickly Pear Cookbook)

(Note: I will be teaching a class on cooking with nopales at the Presidio of Tucson on April 3. You can sign up on their website.)

The new prickly pear pads (nopales) that we cook and use for nopalitos are usually ready in from March to early May.  It’s Carolyn here today tempting you with two recipes for a delicious salsas made with nopalitos. (Definition of nopalito: a nopal, or cactus pad, cut into little pieces).

Why bother to learn how to use prickly pear pads? For hundreds of years, both the fruit and pads were considered folk medicine in Mexico and early research showed that the fibers in nopales were helpful in curbing blood sugar. Today, researchers in the US and Europe are using sophisticated laboratory techniques and specially bred mouse models (that would be transgenic mice, not transgender mice)  to investigate prickly pear fruits, pads, flowers, and seeds as a cure for a wide array variety of ills.

Investigators are looking into prickly pear compounds as antioxidant, antiviral, anti tumor, anti diabetic, and antiparasite.  It may be useful in combating a range of cancers including leukemia, lung, gastric, colon, and ovarian. Studies have considered its use in the treatment of ulcers and alcoholism and a possible role in boosting memory and energy metabolism. Many research labs are investigating prickly pear for cancer prevention.

The many varieties of prickly pear put out their new growth when the spring warms up. All prickly pear pads are edible (meaning they not only won’t kill you but in this case are very nutritious), but they are only appropriate for food when they are new. After about six weeks, they develop a fibrous infrastructure. The easiest kind of pads to prepare are those from the large Mexican variety of prickly pear that do not grow wild north of Mexico. You can grow them in your yard if your winter doesn’t bring much freezing. Or you can get them at a Mexican grocery story. They are called Ficus indica or sometimes Burbank because Luther Burbank did some breeding work on them. The wild cactus pads are also delicious, but harder to prepare because of the abundance of spines.

You can do a rough estimate of when a pad is ready to pick if it is about the size of your hand. The nopales available in Mexican grocery stores are grown by farmers who know how to manipulate the plant to keep fresh pads coming year ’round.

Pick nopales in the spring when the size of your hand.

Pick nopales in the spring when the size of your hand.

To prepare the nopales, you’ll use  tongs, of course, and then don rubber kitchen gloves to protect your hands as you get rid of the stickers. You don’t need industrial strength gloves, just good quality ones from the grocery store will do. Using a common steak knife, scrape vigorously against the growth (from outer edge to stem) to remove the stickers.

Scrape the thorns vigorously in the direction of the stem.

Scrape the thorns vigorously in the direction of the stem.

The edge has lots of stickers so just trim it off.

IMG_0196At this point, you can cut it into small pieces to cook or leave it whole and cut it up later. You can cook them in a frying pan filmed with oil, or use the Rick Bayless method (of TV show fame) and toss them with a little oil, sprinkle with sale, put on a cookie sheet and roast in a 375 degree oven for 20 minutes.  In any case, you should check them and turn them over as they cook.

Cut into small pieces to cook.

Cut into small pieces to cook.

The nopales will turn from bright green to a more olive color as they cook. The gummy sap that some people find objectionable will dry up and become less noticeable.

The cooked nopalitos turn from bright green to olive.

The cooked nopalitos turn from bright green to olive.

You can also cook nopales on the barbecue alongside some chicken to make a delicious taco. 

Here’s the recipe for the sauce in the picture at the top of the blog:

Nopalito and Pineapple Salsa

1 raw, cleaned prickly pear pad

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 cup canned crushed pineapple packed in it’s own juice

¼ cup finely chopped red bell pepper

¼ cup thinly sliced green onions, including some tops

1 tablespoon canned green chiles

1 finely minced serrano chile (optional)

½ teaspoon finely minced garlic

2 tablespoons lime juice

¼ teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon finely minced cilantro (optional)

Cut prickly pear pad in 1 ½ inch squares.  Film a heavy frying pan with the oil and add the prickly pear pads.  Cook over low heat, turning occasionally, until pieces have given up much of their juice and are slightly brown. Remove from pan, cool, and chop into pieces as wide as a matchstick and about ¼-inch long.

Transfer to medium bowl.  Add remaining ingredients, stir to combine and set aside for flavors to mingle.

Nopalito and Bean Salsa

Here’s an even easier recipe and you might have everything except the nopales in your pantry.

1 1/2 cups commercial red salsa

1/2 cup canned black beans, rinsed

1/2 cup cooked nopalitos

1 tablespoon lime juice

1-2 tablespoons chopped cilantro

Combine all ingredients in a bowl. Serve with chips.

______________________

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.

Chapulines–a taste of past & future

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It was a whole new gastronomic experience for me–now perhaps for you too! On a recent trip to colorful Oaxaca, Mexico, with a Mission Garden tour, my eyes and tastes were opened to traditions and to tantalizing potentials of grasshoppers!! Chapulines! (cha-poo-LEE-nays). Tia Marta here to share some fun ideas for trying chapulines creatively, AND some surprising facts about their nutrition.

Grasshoppers, when cooked like this with salt and lime, look a bit more palatable than in nature. Better still–They crunch pleasantly and have tasty snack flavors! Get curious–throw preconceived notions to the wind! After all, insects are the wave of our food-future. (Now I see that chapulines are available all over the internet–no need to travel, but Oaxaca IS a special place to visit for amazing foods!)

Step 1–Roasting or toasting already-cooked chapulines in a dry iron skillet makes them into crispy delicacies–and they’re much easier to grind into the Perfect Chapulin Spice Mix, full of flavor and NUTRITION too! Did you know they are high in protein, dietary fiber, rich in vitamins A,B,and C, have magnesium, calcium, zinc, and essential fatty acids? We might think of them as “recycled, concentrated vegetables.”

Step 2 for the Perfect Chapulin Spice Mix: collect and dry a few chiltepin peppers from your own bush before the birds get them–or find them at NativeSeedsSEARCH or Tucson’s Mission Garden. When pods are dry, you only need 2 or 3 tiny chiltepin pods to add to your spice mix.

Your chapulin–chiltepin spice mix will be more off-the-wall better than any other!

Step 3: Find good natural sea salt–available at many stores. To stay as Sonoran-Desert-local as possible for this project, I made a mix of local salt crystals, one from the Sea of Cortez gifted to me by ASDM ethnobotanist/explorer/educator Jesus Garcia, and another from Guerrero Negro actually made on the Pacific coast of Baja California by Mission Garden volunteer Gay Gilbert.

Step 4: You are ready to crush your ingredients with a hand mortar and pestle! RECIPE for the Perfect Chapulin Spice Mix: (This is a good ratio for any quantity): 1 Tbsp. toasted chapulines 1 tsp. sea salt crystals 2-3 tiny chiltepin pods (to desired “heat”) Mill to desired rough or fine texture.

1st idea: sprinkle on jicama slices w/lime!

2nd idea: Chapulin Spice Mix on homemade pizza or quesadillas! I sprinkled my mix for a fast delicious lunch on a tortilla with melted cheddar cheese and nopalitos–yum!

3rd idea: Dress up hash browns for a zippy Southwest palate-pleaser with your Chapulin Spice Mix!

4th idea: For a cool (and simple) buffet or hors d’oeuvre, sprinkle Chapulin Spice Mix on sliced cucumbers or other veggies. It adds a little kick!

Another super-healthy idea: Add Braggs’ Nutritional Yeast to your Chapulin Spice Mix and toss it with pumpkin seeds or sunflower seeds for a grand health-enhancing snack or energy-boosting trail-mix!

Tia Marta encouraging you–don’t hesitate to take on these delicious gifts of Nature–chapulines! yes, grasshoppers– and try your hand experimenting with your own ways of enjoying them! The next time there is a grasshopper outbreak, don’t swear and fret. Grab your butterfly net! Get out to the garden for a new and different harvest on the fly! Bake them, toast them, spice them up for treats! See what kept early Zapotec and Mixtec cultures thriving with these tiny but plentiful gifts of the insect world. You will be a pace-setter for a future with changing climate!

Prickly Pear Borscht: A Novel Way to Mix Cultures

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(The Savor the Southwest guest poster today is Barbara Rose. She has lived and worked at Bean Tree Farm since 1985. She is an enthusiastic expert in all things Sonoran Desert and has taught hundreds of students how to live in and appreciate this fragile and glorious ecosystem. We thank her for her knowledge and years of inspiration.)

My grandma Evie was born in Brooklyn in 1900 to Ukrainian immigrants, and she moved to southwest Florida in the 1920s. Her back yard was a forest of avocado and citrus trees, and her kitchen was fragrant with crocks of garlicky green tomatoes, cucumber pickles and pots of simmering chicken soup “with the feet” (her way of saying the whole chicken). She smeared onion-infused chicken fat on slices of dense black pumpernickel, and served up bowls of cold, sweet-sour beet borscht, with a hot boiled potato and big dollop of sour cream. I am so grateful that she shared with me a treasure of food and family stories.

Beets have been pickled and soured by lactic acid fermentation for ages. I love beets, but I’m not so good at growing them. Prickly pear cactus thrive, and the ripe fruits are delicious, nutritious, and a gorgeous color.

The animals know when prickly pears are ripe. If they have been nibbling, it is time to pick.

 

I’ve developed a way to make borscht with fermented prickly pears- red desert fruits that sour nicely, have a sweet earthy flavor, and carry far away family food traditions into the desert food forest I love and care for!

I hope you enjoy the recipe, expand on it, and make it your own.

 

Mash the fruit. It is easier if you freeze first as this helps break down the cell walls.

 

Be sure to strain the liquid through a fine mesh strainer to catch every last glochid (those are the tiny thorns).

 

Simmering the juice and broth helps meld the flavors.

SONORAN DESERT BORSCHT

Makes 2 quarts

1 quart fermented, sweet-sour prickly pear fruit juice (see method below)

1 quart broth, strained and chilled (chicken, vegetable, bone, mesquite, or combo, flavored with herbs, alliums, chiles, or whatever you have.)

1 hot boiled potato per serving

Sour cream, crema, yogurt

Combine prickly pear mixture and broth. Simmer with salt, pepper, chile, and your choice of herbs to taste to blend flavors. Chill if serving cold.

To each bowl of borscht add a boiled potato. Garnish with sour cream, and serve with sides of hard-boiled eggs, green onion, and sliced cucumbers.. Borscht turns a gorgeous magenta-pink when the cream is stirred in. Enjoy!

How to ferment prickly pear juice:

Add 1/2 cup of kombucha or whey (liquid strained from yogurt or cheese-making) to 1 quart of prickly pear juice a day or so ahead of making your borscht. Cover with a cloth and taste on occasion. It will develop a sweet-sour flavor as it ferments. When it has that “tang” but still retains some sweetness, it’s ready to use. Sometimes I combine citrus juice with the prickly pear and ferment both. This juice will store in your  fridge for some time, becoming more sour from fermentation. It can also be frozen.

Final step: Serve for lunch. Goes well with other desert delicacies. Find recipes in the Desert Harvesters’ cookbook  Eat Mesquite, a Cookbook for Sonoran Desert Foods.

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You can find more recipes for prickly pear and other wild desert foods  in Eat Mesquite and More: a Cookbook for Sonoran Desert Foods and Living, available at Food Conspiracy Co-op, EXO, Crisol, Mission Garden, Desert Museum, and online at desertharvesters.org. More recipes can be found in Cooking the Wild Southwest: Delicious Recipes for Desert Plants. 

No roll crackers

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Hi friends, it’s true, crackers without the rolling. Amy here sharing this week’s iteration of this miracle recipe I found online. It all started with an abundance of oats…

A friend gifted me many pounds of organic rolled oats. Searching for inspiration to use them, I found Camilla’s Easy No-Roll Oat Crackers ( vegan, oil free, GF). It is a brilliant recipe that I’ve been making often these last few weeks since I discovered it. Besides oats, they contain seeds or mix of seeds. Sunflower makes particularly good crackers but branching out, I remembered Carolyn’s Black Beauty Wafers using saguaro seed. The seeds are strained out when making a syrup so those are a brilliant way to use the seed.

In June, the birds get the first feast of saguaro fruit. If there is more ripening fruit than the birds eat, it falls the ground, often sun dried and intensely concentrated, where I can easily harvest it without poking the plant. No need for a pole!

The ground animals get to feast first before the humans, of course, so we waited. But ripe fruit spoils in the rain, and I would never complain about glorious rain! So this year wasn’t the best saguaro fruit harvest for humans. (below, note the mesquite leaflets for scale)

I had some oooold fruit stored in the pantry so I decided to use the whole fruit instead of just the seeds.

I soaked it in water to soften it.

And blended it enough to grind the seeds. Then I added the oats, salt, baking powder and oil.

The batter is poured onto a greased half sheet pan (or even a bit larger pan to make crackers just a bit thinner).

Instead of rolling the dough, it just needs to be smooth!

I prefer to add just a touch of salt to the batter so I can sprinkle a decent amount on top. I ground my best Mexican sea salt for this.

Then I sprinkled with saguaro seed.

After baking for ten minutes, the crackers can be scored before returning to the oven to finish.

After baking with careful supervision, this batch got darker from the sugar in the saguaro fruit than other batches. A hit of sweetness and delicious! Next time I’ll use a slightly larger yet pan so they are a little thinner. The thinner ones are crispier and more delicate. But think or thin, they are easy to enjoy with spreads, alongside a salad or on their own as a trail snack. Enjoy!

For the recipe, see Camilla’s post on her blog powerhungry.com

Instead of seeds, I added the equivalent weight of dry saguaro fruit. I added a quarter cup of olive oil and reduced the water by that amount. I used approximately 1 teaspoon of coarse sea salt divided between the batter and sprinkled on top with the saguaro seeds. Experiment and have fun!

Marvelous Mulberries–garden dessert in a desert garden

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Yummmmm. If you have never tasted a mulberry–or maybe you remember browsing them as a kid back east or in the Midwest–you will be blown away by the glorious mulberry harvest happening right now at Mission Garden!

Tia Marta here tempting your tastebuds for a gentle, natural sweet treat–but…you have to take action SOON. If you’re in southern Arizona, find a hole in your schedule, and a way to get to the base of Tucson’s A-Mountain this week for a mulberry taste-thrill. It will inspire a new planting in your desert home landscape. Three different mulberries await you in Mission Garden’s beautiful and diverse orchards. Come early–summer hours are Wednesday thru Saturday, 8am-noon.

A sumptuous harvest after this wet winter! Look for trees on the Mission Garden grounds that have a big white fabric tarp underneath, and voila! Shake a branch and dive in for a dark, delicious, delicate mulberry, fresh from the tree. The elongated fruit shown here is Pakistani mulberry (Morus alba x rubra), producing like mad even in Tucson’s heat.

Female trees produce fruit. Male, pollen-producing, trees are controversial in Tucson due to allergenic affects. Somewhere out there, there must be male mulberries; none are growing at Mission Garden, yet we have no dearth of fruit.

Handmade mulberry jams are going fast at the Mission Garden entrance shop! It’s the best jam you ever tasted, made with love by Mission Garden volunteers in their health-department-certified kitchen. You can’t find local gourmet delicacies like this commercially. The closest thing (like frozen raspberries at a grocer’s freezer?) can’t hold a candle to Mission Garden mulberry jam or sauce! ($8 for the 8oz. jar)

Mulberry jam doubles as a gourmet sauce. My pedestrian apple-brown-betty morphed into a fancy dessert with ala mode topped by a dollup o’ Mission Garden’s mulberry jam. (Mulberry seeds in the sauce are minimal and add a tiny crunch texture.)

As you explore further through the Mission Period huerta (orchard) you’ll find yet another gorgeous green mulberry tree with a totally different color and shape of fruit. (Above, looking up into the foliage, and ripe fruit adjacent) This is white mulberry (Morus alba) with a pale pink or lavender color, and a flavor some people describe as “watermelon” or “lingonberry” or “cloud berry.” So juicy you can’t stop….

A big surprise is to learn that we have a NATIVE mulberry “bush” in the arid Southwest–the wild, small-leafed mulberry tree (Morus microphylla). It’s inspiring to know it is adapted to our Sonoran Desert, only needing a little extra water; it grows close to arroyos out in Nature. This may be one of those amazing plants that may help provide food for us in a hotter, drier future…

Each little wild mulberry is a zap of sweet nutrition, packed with healthy complex sugars, dietary fiber, beta carotines, vitamin C and iron.

I can hardly wait until Mission Garden is propagating cuttings of all these several amazing mulberry species. Already I’m figuring where I can plant them in my yard. Whatever we can’t harvest each season will be a gift for the birds!

This coming SATURDAY, MAY 18, is SAN YSIDRO FIESTA, Mission Garden’s celebration of the traditional pilkan harvest (heirloom wheat harvest). I’ve been playing with recipes using these heirloom grains pairing them with mulberries, but I HAD to relay this timely mulberry story for you ASAP, so you could get to Mission Garden this week to jump through this narrow “mulberry window” of opportunity.

Tia Marta hoping to see you at San Ysidro Fiesta Saturday–or sooner, browsing a mulberry tree this week!

Savory Wolfberry Amaranth Balls

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Hello friends, Amy here enjoying another great year for the wolfberry bush (Lycium fremontii …I think) in my yard. Tucson’s native species of the Chinese goji berry, they are similarly packed with antioxidants and health benefits. In the tomato family, it’s called tomatillo in Spanish, not to be confused in size, shape, color or taste to the garden variety of husked ground cherries that go by that name. Wolfberries taste somewhat like tomatoes and work well in sweet and savory dishes, when I manage to harvest more than I eat raw from the bush. Thriving on only rainwater, one huge plant produces plenty of fruit for me and the resident phainopeplas.

Inspired by this recipe for millet balls, I used fresh wolfberries in place of dried Turkish barberries.

It was delicious! It reminded me of falafel, crispy on the outside and grainy on the inside. A simple cilantro, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil chutney complimented them perfectly.

So the next time, I decided to use amaranth seeds. I bought this from the store, but you can harvest your own from wild or cultivated plants in the late summer if you’re ambitious.

I toasted them in oil until they became a shade darker and a few of them popped open.

I added water, three times the volume of amaranth seed, and cooked in the solar oven until it was creamy. Then I mixed in fresh wolfberries and enough flour to make a soft dough.

The dough was muuuuch stickier, so I added significantly more flour than for the millet balls and still they looked shaggy. (I used all purpose wheat flour but next time will try amaranth flour).

The toasted flavor came though and I’m glad the only seasoning I used was salt and wolfberries. The dough certainly didn’t need any egg or flax egg to hold together! They baked up just as well as the millet version, but with the texture of a cookie. Next I’ll try them sweetened!

I served them with a lemon pickle but that tomatillo salsa would be good. I took the rest to a picnic among the wildflowers. Happy spring!

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