Juniper Berries: Aromatic Flavor

What we call juniper berries are actually small cones — green their first year and then changing to bluish the second year. They grow throughout the southwest at elevations of at least 3,000 feet and frequently in the company of pinon pines. If you’ve ever tasted gin you know the flavor of juniper.  Although gin is flavored with lots of different herbs and spices, juniper is the predominant flavor.

Chef Molly Beverly of Prescott College shared with me her recipe for Juniper Berry-Chili Rub for Meat.  Molly is a real activist in the Northern Arizona food world. Not only does she keep Prescott College students fed delicious, locally sourced, organic food at the college’s Crossroads Cafe, she also participates in spreading the word on healthy eating.  She teaches cooking classes, is active in Slow Food, and writes a column for a Prescott monthly.  You can read some of her columns here.

Chef Molly Beverly  of Prescott College                          

Here is Chef Beverly’s recipe for Juniper Berry-Chili Rub:

Heaping ¼ cup dried juniper berries

2 tablespoons chili powder

1 teaspoon Mexican oregano powder

1 teaspoon ground cumin

2 teaspoons unsweetened cocoa powder

2 teaspoons kosher salt

4 large fat cloves garlic

4 tablespoons olive oil

Water as needed

Using a blender, grind juniper berries.  Add remaining ingredients and grind all of a paste, adding water to keep liquid moving.  Rub into meat and allow to marinate, refrigerated for 4 to 6 hours. Roast, basting with excess marinade from pan.

(For more delicious recipes using juniper berries, check out my cookbook Cooking the Wild Southwest, Delicious Recipes for Desert Plants.  I include a recipe for Artisanal Gin made with juniper berries and nine other flavorings that people have raved over.)

Olives – Black or Green

Olives, ripe and ready to pick.

Fall may mean colorful leaves and apple harvests in the temperate regions of the globe, but in Southern Arizona and warm desert regions around the world, it is olive harvest time. Several years ago a famous author died, and many notables who had been guests in his home on the coast of Southern Italy recalled their visits. One woman remembered walking through the olive groves and plucking and eating juicy olives. I laughed aloud when I read that.  She may have plucked something, but it wasn’t olives. Olives off the tree are very bitter and they must be processed to be edible.

Various cultures have their own methods of removing the bitterness from olives. There’s the dry salt method, the brine method, the water method and the lye method.  For 30 years I have followed instructions taught by the late Dr. Robert H. Forbes, who became dean of the College of Agriculture at the University of Arizona in 1899. He had made an intensive study of the home processing of curing olives. His process uses lye and the method has always worked for me.  Last week when I went to the hardware store to buy the lye and told the clerk what I was going to do with it, he kept cautioning me that it was poison and came close to refusing to sell it to me. By following the instructions carefully, I never poisoned myself or the recipients of my olives.

(Aside: Dr. Forbes was still alive when I was a young journalism student in 1964. I interviewed him at his home on the edge of campus on Olive Street, surrounded by gnarled old olive trees.)

You can home process green olives, black olives or those somewhere in between.

Olives, green, black and in-between, in a lye bath to leach the bitterness. They will remain in the bath for 5 to 7 days.

It’s too much typing to explain Dr. Forbes’ method, but the good folks at UC Davis have done a complete description of each method of olive processing and you can find it here.    The difference in Dr. Forbes’ lye method is that it doesn’t call for a changing of the lye bath.  You just leave the olives in the original lye solution until either taste or a litmus paper shows that the bitterness has been removed.  For me, this has been between five and seven days.  But lye is cheap and you’ll have more than necessary, so if changing helps, why not?

After the bitterness is gone, the olives are rinsed (and rinsed!) to remove the lye and hardened with successively strong salt brine solutions. Lastly, they are freshened in water.  I like to flavor mine with a mixture of olive oil, wine vinegar, garlic cloves and fresh herbs from my garden.

Home processing olives is neither difficult nor overly time consuming, but you do need to commit about five minutes a day to the endeavor.  For that little bit of effort, you can end up with a year’s supply of olives for only the cost of lye and salt and some nice gifts for your friends and family.

(Still looking for creative uses for your  prickly pear juice and mesquite meal? Take a look at my cookbooks The Prickly Pear Cookbook and Cooking the Wild Southwest: Delicious Recipes for Desert Plants.  There is a fabulous recipe for Mango-Olive Salsa in The New Southwest Cookbook.) 

Prickly Pear in Mexico

Prickly pear fruits on display in Sunday market in Chiapas, Mexico

It’s the tail end of the prickly pear fruit season and I hope everyone has laid in their stock of fruit, frozen whole or made into juice.  Prickly pears fruit (tunas) and pads (nopales) are still somewhat exotic in the United States although they have been eaten in the area by the native populations for thousands of years.  In Mexico, however, they are a typical part of the diet, as normal as peaches and green beans are to those of us who live in the more northern areas of the Americas.

The fruits in the photo above are not unripe, they are just a different variety of prickly pear from the bright magenta ones that grow wild in the western United States. The vendor has arranged them artfully to appeal to buyers.

Options in a traditional Oaxaca cafe.

The menu above in a small Oaxaca City cafe shows the list of options with nopal that the cook is offering, from cake, to marmalade to tamales.

                                                           Prepared products with nopal on sale in Mexican market.

Nopal is also used as medicine in Mexico. The health benefits of prickly pear pads have been known by practitioners of  traditional medicine for generations, but recent medical research has shown that eating the pads or nopal actually lowers cholesterol and helps with diabetes. This has led to a slew of new products such as those seen above on display in an outdoor Mexican market.  Some of these products are now available in the United States.

Oaxaca City fresco of woman gathering cochineal from nopal plant.

Although Mexicans have relished the fruit and pads of the prickly pear plant throughout history, they also gathered the tiny cochineal beetles that eat the juice of the fruit.  When crushed and properly prepared, the beetles can make a red dye that resists fading.  The Spanish invaders were excited with this find as the Europeans at that time did not have a good red dye. Since red was the color of kings,  it was important to have a good source. The photo above is a small section of a very large fresco in the municipal building on the zocolo in Oaxaca City.

If you are looking for some good ideas with how to use your prickly pear juice (how many margaritas can you drink?) you’ll find some good recipes in my cookbooks: The Prickly Pear Cookbook,  The New Southwest Cookbook, and Cooking the Wild Southwest.  For some ideas of other plants you can gather watch the video trailer associated with Cooking the Wild Southwest. 

Superior, AZ Prickly Pear Festival

Jean Groen picking juicy prickly pear fruit.

The central Arizona town of Superior is getting into the desert spirit with their first Prickly Pear Festival on August 25.  They will beat the heat by starting early at 6:30 a.m. with a guided desert walk, followed by an pancake breakfast (just a base for prickly pear syrup!) from 8 to 9:30.   At 9 a.m. , just 25 lucky participants will join Pete Rendek to learn how to brew prickly pear pale ale.

Those particpants not in the ale class can join Jean Groen and me for demonstrations on making prickly pear juice and other delicious goodies with prickly pear starting at 10 a.m. in the air-conditioned Senior Center.  Jean, a graduate home economist, teaches a popular series of classes at Boyce Thompson Arboretum. She is the author of “Plants of the Sonoran Desert and Their Many Uses,” and “Foods of the Superstitions, Old and New.”

Other vendors will be offering prickly pear products including Cheri from Cheri’s Desert Harvest with her delicious syrups, jams and candies.  The Chocolate Lady will bring chocolate prickly pear truffles (can’t wait for those) and restaurants in town will feature special prickly pear dishes.

Jean recently had one of her recipes using prickly pear pads (nopalitos) printed in Better Homes and Gardens magazine.  What an honor.  You know when nopalitos make it into a magazine like BH&G, that they are making their way into the national consciousness.   Jean has shared the recipe with us below.

SALSA JAM

1 ½ c. peeled and chopped tomatoes.

½ c. chopped onions

½ c. tomato sauce

1/3 c. minced cilantro

½ c. canned, rinsed, drained, chopped nopalitos (or use fresh)

1/3 c. pickled jalapenos, chopped

2 Tbsp fresh lime juice

1 tsp. grated lime peel

¼ tsp. hot pepper sauce

4 ½ c. sugar

¾ c. water

1 box pectin

Squeeze tomatoes to remove juice and seed before chopping.  Mix first 9 ingredients.  Stir well and let set for 10 minutes.  Combine water and pectin in saucepan.  Bring to boil on high.  Boil for 1 minute.  Pour into the vegetable mixture.  Stir 3 minutes.  Put in containers and store in freezer.

Serve over cream cheese with crackers.

For more recipes for prickly pear, check out The Prickly Pear Cookbook and Cooking the Wild Southwest.  Both books give complete information on harvesting and preparing both the pads and fruit of the prickly pear as well as turning them into delicious dishes your family and guests will love.

Prickly Pear: Juicing Made Easy

Prickly pears are ripening!

As the summer deepens, prickly pears are ripening in the desert.  In the higher elevations, they may still be a few weeks away from that perfect juicy purple ripeness.  I’ve been playing with prickly pears for more than 40 years, and have finally settled on the easiest, quickest way to make the juice.  I’m a little embarrassed when I think of all the time I’ve wasted in earlier years with more complicated techniques.

The first thing to do is assemble your tools.  Do this first and you’ll save time and aggravation in the long run.  You need tongs, tweezers and rubber gloves.  Just grocery store gloves will do, but buy good ones, not the cheapest.  This will keep most of the stickers out of your fingers.  The tweezers are for the occasional sticker that will still find its way into your hands.

Essential tools: Tweezers, tongs and rubber gloves

First rinse the fruit in a colander to wash off any dust. Then cut the prickly pears into big chunks — three to four pieces each.

Cut the fruit into big chunks.

You do not need to take off the stickers or peel them.  The peel is contains healthy nutrients.  It is especially rich in betalains, which are powerful antioxidants. In fact, prickly pears are the only know source of all of the 24 naturally occurring belatains.  If you’d like to learn more you, can read about it here.  Prickly pears are also high in vitamins A and C.

Cut up about a dozen pears, a few more if they are small, and put them in a blender jar.  For the first batch, you’ll need to add about a fourth cup of water to get the process going. (For later batches, just use a little juice from the first batch).

Load up the blender

Run the blender until you have a nice slurry.  Then strain through a fine sieve.

Sieve will strain out seeds, stickers, everything but delicious juice.

Around a dozen prickly pears should give about a cup of juice.  To make syrup, transfer it to a saucepan, add 1 1/2 cups of sugar (or less), a little lemon juice and about a teaspoon of cornstarch.  Cook until thickened, store in jar and refrigerate.

Use your prickly pear juice in drinks or use it to make syrup.

You can use your syrup to top pancakes, waffles, French toast or ice cream.  If you are interested in branching out to other recipes you can learn about Prickly Pear Onion Jam, Prickly Pear Barbecue Meatballs or Prickly Pear Ice Cream in The Prickly Pear Cookbook.  One my favorite recipes is Prickly Pear, Citrus and Chipotle Sauce for Chicken in The New Southwest Cookbook.  Two simple but delicious recipes are Prickly Pear Salad Dressing and Summer Jam in my latest book Cooking the Wild Southwest. 

Epazote, a Mexican herb

Epazote, a culinary herb from Mexico

A few weeks ago I wrote about Jacqueline Soule’s new book Father Kino’s Herbs.  I was delighted to learn more about epazote (Chenopodium ambrosioides)  because I had recently planted some in my yard.  Unlike some of the other herbs Soule writes about, epazote originated in the New World.  It was traded in the marketplace at Tenochitlan in Central Mexico as early as the 1530′s.  Mexicans who made their way north to what is now Arizona brought epazote seeds with them and it was found in the gardens at San Xavier del Bac, a Kino mission outside of Tucson.

The most widely known use for epazote is to cook it with a pot of beans.  It not only gives black beans a special little zing of flavor, but it also helps break down hard-to-digest vegetable proteins and renders beans less gas-producing.  Epazote can sometimes be found dried, but according to Soule,  the dried herb carries the flavor but not the digestive benefits.  If that’s what you seek, you’ll need a fresh plant in your yard or in a pot on your patio or balcony. Epazote is also used in green chile sauces and in dishes traditionally cooked in Yucatan and Veracruz.  While it is an essential flavor component in some of these dishes, on its own it is bitter and medicinal tasting.

In the United States, epazote is sometimes called American wormseed, Jesuit tea or Jerusalem oak — the latter probably because the shape of the leaf is a little like an oak.

Cherry Pickin’

Picking luscious Queen Ann cherries in California.

I’m a real desert rat, but when the temperatures get into the double digits regularly,  I get a yen to check out other ecosystems.  This year my husband and I visited our friends Mal and Susan Terrence who live in Humbolt County near the Salmon River in far northern California.  What a pleasure to be in a place that has an abundance of water for gardening and household use.  I went crazy picking cherries, rhubarb, pea pods, raspberries, greens and big flower bouquets from Sue’s garden.   Cherries have pits that must be removed if you are going to cook with them, and there are several clever devices for cutting them out.  Here’s a simple plastic device that stamps out the pits and collects them in a little plastic bin.  The cherry rolls out into your pan.  It isn’t 100 percent accurate so you need to check each cherry.

Using plastic cherry pitter.

We mixed the pitted cherries with a little sugar and made a topping from oatmeal, butter, brown sugar and a little flour.  Then we put it in the solar oven.

Positioning cherry crisp in the solar oven.

Here’s a picture of the result.  It gotten eaten so fast that I didn’t get a photo of the whole dish.  I rescued this last piece for a picture.

Last serving of the delicious cherry crisp.

Another Way to Use Mesquite

Make a delicious brunch coffee drink with mesquite broth, milk and whipped cream.

If you’ve gathered your mesquite pods and put them aside to dry until  grinding in the fall, you might be anxious to try a little something with mesquite now.  This luscious drink that I call a Gila Monster is easy to make.  First boil some mesquite pods in plenty of water until soft.  After everything has cooled down, plunge your hands in and wring and tear the pods until all the sweet goodness goes into the water.  This is a great activity for kids.  Strain off the broth which I admit is going to look a bit like dirty dishwater. Discard the seeds and fiber.

Now you can use this sweet broth for drinks or pudding.  For adults, make a mixture of coffee, milk, and mesquite broth. Top with whipped cream.  A shot of Kahlua or hazelnut liqueur is a delicious addition.  For kids, you will probably want to omit the coffee or cut it back to a tablespoon or two.

It isn’t hard to invent ways to use mesquite broth. For inspiration and other recipes using mesquite broth, take a look at my cookbook Cooking the Wild Southwest: Delicious Recipes for Desert Plants.

Saguaro Harvest Season

Close-up of ripe saguaro fruit

Finally it is saguaro season.  The red objects on saguaro that look like flowers are actually fruit.  Since I’m kind of a wimp about the heat, my favorite time to gather saguaro fruits is right after dawn when it is coolest on the desert.  Tohono O’odham women used a saguaro rib, or maybe two lashed together, to push the fruits off the plant.  I have resorted to a metal fruit picker.  It helps to both dislodge the fruit and collect it in the attached basket.  If a ripe fruit that has opened falls to the ground, it picks up a lot of gravel.

Bird having saguaro breakfast.

Another reason to get up early, is that the birds are out early too, anxious to breakfast on any fruits that have just opened.  I usually clean the fruit in the field, scraping the pulp out of the rind into a clean bucket.  But tradition says that when you discard the rind, you should always do so with the red part up for that brings the rain (and boy, do we want the rain!)

Inside of the saguaro rind.

So what will you do with your saguaro fruit?  The easiest thing to do is mix some into a fruit salad.  You can also mush it up and stir some into softened ice cream and then refreeze.  Sometimes I measure a one-cup amount, put it in a small zipper freezer bag and freeze it flat for use later in the year.

Halved saguaro fruit.

If you want to separate the juice and seeds, soak the fruit in as much water as you have pulp.  Plunge your hands in to break up the clumps.  After a little while, pour off the liquid and boil to reduce.  Add some sugar and cook it down further to make syrup.  Spread the remaining seeds out to dry.

Saguaro seeds drying.

The seeds are high in vitamin C and can be stored for use in baked goods such as quick breads and cookies.

Delicious saguaro bread.

It’s easy to use saguaro fruit in your favorite recipes.  For other ideas and tested recipes, check out my cookbook Cooking the Wild Southwest: Delicious Recipes for Desert Plants.  Thank you to Connie Lauth for some of these saguaro photos.

Mesquite Harvest Season

Amy Valdes Schwemm educates about mesquite gathering and cooking.

The first crop of mesquite pods is ripe and many have fallen to the ground.  If you want to have your own stock of mesquite meal for baking, this is the time to begin gathering.  I have to admit to having raked up bushels of lovely fat mesquite pods from the trees in front of my house and tossed them in the garbage.  Am I nuts?  No — despite their beautiful appearance, these pods taste chalky and bad.  Several decades ago we planted quickly growing Chilean or South American mesquite trees. They are lushly beautiful, but if I had it to do over again, I’d plant native mesquites. They would have grown more slowly but provided me with a great crop of delicious mesquite pods.  I’ve managed to begin a collection of  honey mesquite pods and will add to it as more pods become ripe.

Reddish mesquite pods at the top, buff-colored below

If you are unclear which pods are tasty and how and when to gather them,  food expert Amy Valdes Schwemm is giving a free mesquite harvesting workshop on June 28, 2012 from 4 to 7 PM at the Santa Cruz River Farmers’ Market in Tucson.  If you can’t make it,  just be sure to gather from native trees.  Many mesquite trees will put out a second crop of pods in the fall.  Amy is one of the editors of the community-produced cookbook Eat Mesquite with lots of fabulous recipes for your delicious mesquite meal.

I keep my pods in five-gallon paint buckets in my shed awaiting the Desert Harvesters grinding sessions in the fall.  There are several opportunities beginning in November in Tucson.  You can also find grinding sessions  in Phoenix and Sierra Vista.  If you and a large group of friends want to sponsor a grinding, Desert Harvesters will send a hammermill and experienced operators to you.

Mesquite pods with bruchid beetle holes.

Through the summer your mesquite pods will probably develop some holes where the bruchid beetles have eaten their way out.  The eggs are deposited in the flowers so the beetles are a integral part of the pod, not a later infestation.  If  you don’t want the holes, you can freeze your pods for a while.  It’s a personal decision — either you freeze the beetle inside or let it crawl out leaving behind the odd leg or antenna.  Either way, just consider it more protein.  The Native Americans in the area have been eating them for millenia with no problem.

For more recipes for mesquite meal and other desert delicacies, check out my cookbook Cooking the Wild Southwest, Delicious Recipes for Desert Plants.