Prickly Pear Tunas

This past weekend, our son, Kurt, and his girlfriend, Agata, shared with us their wonderful stories and photos of their Italian vacation which included several days visiting her parents in Butera, Sicily. One of the many things that they shared with us was that Kurt was introduced to eating prickly pear fruits which in Sicily they call "Fichi di India".  We wondered if they are the same as our local Prickly Pear tunas. I know that our local wild prickly pear is sometimes harvested by some of local Mexican people, so I decided to give it a try... I picked a couple of tunas that seemed ripe(dark red in color) and we tried them... discovered they had lots of hard seeds but the pulp was slightly sweet and definitely juicy.  Agata and Kurt didn't think the local fruit tasted much like what they had eaten in Sicily. I was proud of granddaughter Lucy as she gave it a try...she didn't ask for any more but at least she tried it. 

Then I decided to check out the internet to see I could find out about harvesting and found that this is the best time of the year to harvest so I decided to make some prickly pear juice for the fun of it. The following photos tell the story... from six peeled tunas, I got about a cup of concentrated juice.  It was not as sweet as I expected so I added a little sugar and diluted 50:50 with water. The juice tasted alittle earthy but not bad. I'm thinking that the tunas might be riper and sweeter in another couple of weeks and I'll try again.