Pomegranate and Cactus Fruit

Pomegranate and Cactus Fruit

The other night I ate a pomegranate picked right from the tree. All rich, green hues on the outside and being ripe it had burst open on the tree to expose its deep, ruby red fruit. Too be frank, I didn’t know what to do with it as I was being encouraged to eat it. The pomegranate was too exotic looking to get my mind around and with fruit exposed I was suspect to eat it. It also seemed a bit obscene like a Georgia O'Keefe painting.

“Don’t eat the white, just eat the red. The white is no good.” After some experimenting and scattering the fruit all around me on the floor I figured it out. The pomegranate is a green pod with white compartments that hold the red seeds you eat. The fruit appears dry till you begin to touch the seeds, then they start to release an absolute abundance of juice.

What a treat. The sweetness and the juiciness of those rich red seeds were worth the trepidation and the mess. My hands began to turn red and I’m sure my mouth and face were also.

Many of my stories revolve around visiting folks at their ranches in the country. As I mentioned in a previous post (Spanish 101) I have had the pleasure of meeting a remarkable women who at the age of 96 still maintains an immense garden full of fruit bearing trees with limes, lemons, grapefruit, oranges, peaches, apricots, sour apples that aren’t apples and stuff I have no name for.

Awhile back on what was my first visit to the ranch we were treated to a salsa made by two of the brothers. As everyone sat and talked they picked, peeled and served us the following:

Recipe #1
Diced Oranges - fresh from the tree
Diced Tomatoes - fresh from the vine
Minced Hot Peppers - fresh from the bush
Salt
Grapefruit Juice - fresh squeezed from the tree

For lunch one day there was fresh broccoli and greens they had sent us home with.

Even after my experience with the pomegranate I still wasn’t prepared for the cactus fruit. But it turned out to be somewhat more familiar to me. I knew that you could eat the cactus pads of the nopale but I had no idea that the cactus produced an edible fruit.

During this time of year the cactus bloom and produce fruit called tuna. Some of the tuna is green and has a tangy, sour taste that I have eaten in soups. Other tuna is red, pink or yellow, each one with its own slightly different flavor. To eat one is like putting something in your mouth with the texture of a strawberry but the taste of mixed berries. The most wonderful experience is to eat the tuna in the mornings, right off the cactus and still chilled from the night before. You will see people out picking the tuna everywhere and can find them in the markets for sale. Not only is the tuna eaten as a fruit or used in cookining but makes a great refreshing beverage when blended.

Recently, relatives here had been to the beaches on the west coast and brought us back a fruit, green in color, shaped like a pear the size of a small watermelon and covered with bumpy little spines. When I asked what it tasted like the answer was “Everything. It tastes like all kinds of fruit.” And it did. There were distinct flavors of banana, pineapple, orange and others in a fruit that was thick and kind of creamy.

The fruit and vegetables here may not be uniform in shape and size and may have some blemishes but they are right from the source. A farmer was selling tomatoes in town one weekend. He had his pickup loaded, no crates, no boxes, just tomatoes piled in the bed of the truck. You probably wouldn’t have wanted the ones on the bottom but you know what, they were fresh. These tomatoes weren’t picked green, transported to a warehouse to be gassed and forced to ripen before they reached the supermarket.

Another visit to another ranch one evening and we were eating figs off the bush and picking wild mushrooms for breakfast the next morning. In our yard there is a banana tree with young bananas ripening. There is a tree with fruit that has the texture and flavor of ice cream and then there are the lemon trees they will lay sheets under to collect and dry the blossoms for tea.

I have joked that my new diet is tortillas, beans and beer but in all reality I am most certainly eating better and healthier than I have for many years. The pork, chicken and beef we eat are all raised locally. The amount of processed foods is at a minimum and when we visit folks we are always sent home with fresh eggs or homemade cheese. Aside from the health benefits I have noticed another positive outcome from all this freshness. We produce very little trash in the way of cans, jars and cardboard packaging. With three of us living in this house the amount of trash that is set out each Monday doesn’t fill a normal size trash can halfway.

Look for an upcoming post on Mexican fast food - yes there is McDonalds, Burger King and KFC here but we'll be talking about something better !!!