darkflavor

Tonight with my chicken I had cactus. It seemed similar to green peppers, but no, it’s a bit different. First off the preparation was a challenge. The cactus is saturated with water much like a pepper I thought. However, it is different. A pepper contains water in pocket membranes. Cooking a pepper heats the water until it either burst from the pocket from pressure or sweats the water out. The cactus contains the water in slime, mucus. Not aware of this I placed half of my cactus with an onion and spices in a pan. When cooking this dish the cactus oozed mucus. It finally filled a large section of the pan with slime that hung from my stirring utensil several inches. In most cases as I pulled the utensil away from the pan a thick line of mucus followed all the way back to the pan.
I threw it all away.
The next approach was to rinse as much mucus off the cactus as I could in the sink. I thought putting the last half of my cactus in a bowl with water was the best bet. Then strain the cactus from the slime filled water. That didn’t work. As I strained the bowl the slime collected into a thick stream pulling half of my cactus past my fingers down the drain. The slime was thick and viscous, making the cactus slippery and pulling it with it out of the bowl.
Now I am down to one fourth of my original amount of cactus. Fifteen minutes were spent hand rinsing a few chunks of cactus at a time.
Unfortunately, the heat of cooking the remaining amount of this desert plant caused the cactus to once again slime my pan. Oh well. What can I do? The Fates it seemed have decreed that I eat cactus slime tonight.
I cook my smoked mesquite chicken only to later have it with my onions and cactus. Here is the interesting part. While I couldn’t detect a taste from the pasty-like cactus, it did have a overwhelmingly familiar odor of an intoxicating Mexican liquor: tequila.

Bon Appetite!