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RE: The invasive plant saga: phase 2
You can eat those prickley pair cactus pads, they are pretty good. I've juiced the pears as well, though looks like you have quite a bunch of them, perhaps a time consuming canning project?
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I have eaten the young pads and I agree they are good. I also eat the pears but by now I'm a little tired of removing tiny glochid spines from my fingers. The reality is also that the opuntia is being spread elsewhere and needs to go
These were everywhere in arizona where i grew up. We had all sorts of recipes for them. Wild pigs would always raid our cactus leaving cartoonish bite marks out of the pads.
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The wild pigs were ok with the spines? How did you deal with the glochid spines?
Yeah those javelina eat the spines, they even eat cholla cactus (aka jumping cactus) which are way more spiny. When i used to hunt quail i would see javelina in packs with many of them sporting thorns in their snout.
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Ouch!
The way we dealt with the spines was to burn them off the tiny spines burn up quickly. Usually a natural gas burner for a few seconds gets rid of the tiny fuzzy ones. The rest of the big ones are cutoff with a paring knife. A fancy kitchen blow torch would do the job perfectly but i used my range burners.
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Thanks for that, sounds exactly right. I'll also use the kitchen gas stove
What do they taste like?
Oddly enough, they taste a bit like green beans
They are good boiled or pan fried. I really like them scrambled with eggs. Kind of reminds me of tomatillo or green chili with a tart flavor.
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