Cherry Chipotle Nopales Salsa Recipe
Serve this delicious salsa with chips or as a side with any Mexican dish. I love this salsa as an accompaniment to scrambled eggs and feta in corn tortillas. The salsa is high in bioflavonoids, with its array of vibrant rainbow colors.
Equipment
- Medium pot
Ingredients
- 2 medium tomatoes
- 2 medium-sized nopales cactus pads*
- ½ sweet onion
- 1 cup black cherries
- ⅛ teaspoon sea salt
- ⅛ teaspoon chipotle powder
- 2 limes
- ¼ cup minced cilantro to taste
- 1 handful of edible flowers - Calendula, scarlet runner beans, and a touch of red clover are the flowers in the pictured salsa. Also consider the flowers of bee balm, chives, rose of sharon, squash, or daylily (consume in moderation if you are eating daylily for the first time, as a small percentage of the population is allergic)
Directions
- Dice the nopales into ½ inch cubes, bring three cups of water to a boil, boil the diced pads for two minutes, strain and put aside to cool.
- Pit the cherries. Dice the tomatoes, onions, cherries, and cilantro. Place in the serving bowl.
- Add the salt, chipotle powder, and the juice of one and half lemons. Slice the remaining half lemon into garnish wedges. Mix.
- Add the edible flowers. Consider pulling the petals away from the functioning parts. For example, pull the calendula “petals” off of the whole flower (the green parts are tough and taste medicinal).
- Garnish with lime wedges, coarse sea salt, and whole edible flowers.
Notes
* Nopales, or cactus pads, have two types of armor: the spines and the minuscule, barely visible, spiny hairs called glochids. If you are using store-bought pads they will be de-spined but may still have the glochids, which are found at the little circular spots (areoles) throughout the pads. Glochids annoyingly lodge into skin, the tongue, and throat alike, and can be felt for days if not gingerly removed. I find it easy to scrub them off with a metal scrub pad or vegetable brush, followed by liberal rinsing. Alternately they can be singed off by roasting over a fire on a grill or holding by tongs over flame. Some people cut off all of the areoles with a paring knife. If your pad is young and tender you can dice it, without peeling, after making sure all the glochids and spines are removed. If the pad is a little older, its skin will be tough, and should be removed with a vegetable peeler. I grow a spineless variety of nopal, which has just a few glochids; the fresh young pads only take a minute to process before preparing. A young pad will bear little green protrusions at the areoles, which resemble green teddy-bear-like spines; these are actually the leaves of the cactus, which fall off as the pad ages. See these tiny leaves on a freshly emerged pad in the close-up picture below. If the pad is a lighter green color and still bears its tender green “spines,” it is at a good stage to harvest, and will probably not need to be peeled. If you are harvesting wild prickly pear pads, harvest with thick leather gloves, and cut away any spines with a knife. Then remove the glochids as previously described. Please scroll down past the pictures to read about the medicine of prickly pear.