Prickly Pear Margaritas

In addition to all the fruits and vegetables we are growing in the garden and in the orchard, there are a few things that are growing wild on the land that we can use in cooking. One of these things is the prickly pear cactus with it's lovely purple fruit. It's not easy to pick a prickly pear (or to say it either), but the juice is pretty sweet and we were able to make margaritas without too much injury to ourselves.

Ron picked the pears using a pair of tongs (I think that I am going to take up writing tongue twisters) and placed them in a bowl of water. After they soaked for a short time, he cut them in half and cut off any parts that looked bad and put them in the blender. We used an old t-shirt to strain the juice by stretching the shirt over a juice container and pouring the juice. Ron had read that a t-shirt is better that cheese cloth, I'm guessing that you want the smaller holes to keep out any of the small spines. I was going to reuse the shirt and started rinsing it off only to get a couple small spines stuck in my hand. They are very small and hard to see! Needless to say, I ended up throwing the short away. Luckily the kids outgrow shirts at a fast rate so there will always be more.

Dork that I am, I forgot to get pictures of the actual margaritas! But they were good thanks to Emeril Lagasse.

Next we need to find a recipe to eat the pads, nopal.