Prickly Pear Lime Jelly

I felt super cool after making Prickly Pear Jelly a couple years ago, but Aaron wasn't a fan of the hours of boiling and straining. Luckily my friend Rachel Sevey was super excited about trying it out with me. I had forgotten most of what I learned two years ago, so it was back to reading articles online and watching YouTube tutorials. Here's the recipe that we most closely followed: https://www.rootsimple.com/2010/08/low-sugar-prickly-pear-jelly-recipe/

Step one was picking the prickly pear. We looted a cactus patch at the end of a cul-de-sac while walking to preschool. Glaucia and Allison tagged along with their kids to help pick. Elliot and Wyatt were particularly enthusiastic about grabbing the cactus fruit with the tongs and dropping them into the paper bags. We ended up with 3 or 4 big bags, which turned out to be WAY more than we needed.

Rachel met a knowledgeable man with dreadlocks at a farmers market that advised her to freeze and then thaw the prickly pears to make them easier to juice. This sounded like great advice, so I put the fruit in the freezer and set them out to thaw the night before our canning party. What we had failed to understand was that the juice comes out of fruit as it thaws. This would have been great if I had set it up to strain and drain into a big bowl. As it was, I ended up with a magenta murder scene from all the juice that leaked out of the paper bag. The juice in the party pail and pot was contained, but we had to re-strain it because it was mixed with spines. 

The magenta droplets covered an impressive radius. Luckily it cleaned up pretty easily. 

We tried a whole bunch of blending, mashing, and straining methods to get the juice out. I think that the ideal strategy for the future would be to freeze them, then let them thaw overnight on either coffee filters or cloth. That way all the juice will strain out into a bowl. If you wanted to squeeze out more juice, throw the fruit in a blender, spines and all. Then dump the mush into a cloth, fold it up, and wring it over a bowl. It took way too long to wait for the juice to seep out through the cloth. 

Anywho, I had a lovely time with some lovely ladies while Elliot and Aaron played Starcraft with Jason Sevy. 

The final product! I made two cases of these bad boys and wish I had brought more jars to fill up with this goodness. 

We froze some of the leftover juice in an ice cube tray. We use them to make vibrant smoothies

Elliot: "Can I have some of the BEAUTIFUL prickly pear jam that we made?"