Winter Foraging

Here's some more culinary adventures from my "Eat Mesquite and More" book:

Acorn cookies! These were SO MUCH WORK. I think that I picked acorns that were not appropriately ripe, because it was way harder to shell them than YouTube led me to believe it would be. I'm going to try again next year because the end result was so delicious.  

They were made from acorn flour and looked, smelled, and tasted like acorns! They turned out so cute!

Note the suspiciously chocolatey hand of my helper

Our barrel cactus dinner, featuring a cactus-butternut rice dish and cactus upside down cake! The cake was a hit, probably because we don't usually have desert and this tasted like... cake. The kids didn't love the sauteed cactus. Next time I would cut it into smaller bits and add sausage. 

The main success of the barrel cactus harvest was collecting the seeds. We put chia seeds in yogurt and oatmeal on an almost daily basis, and the cactus seeds can be used the same way. We ended up doing three rounds of barrel cactus seed harvests with different groups of friends. 

The fruits are much easier to pick than the other cactus fruits because there are no spines on the fruits themselves. We only had minor stabbings from on each of our harvests!

Some excellent helpers hard at work! You have to cut the fruits open, then scrape the mucilaginous seeds into water to rinse them off before toasting them to dry.