Anything that doesn’t absolutely, positively, have to happen today gets the put-off. The extent to which this is a problem is in direct proportion to the number of things that absolutely, positively, have to happen today. In the winter, when very little has to happen today, I’d go so far as to argue that triage is the best system going. In the spring, though, when each today has a significant set of demands, it can most definitely be a problem.

Today, the problem is Carlo Rossi Chablis.

I asked my friend Maggie to help because I knew she had the right hat

You see, it’s dandelion wine season. This is the third year we’ve made it, and the third year we’ve harvested our dandelions from one particular field at Mass Audubon’s Long Pasture Sanctuary. This is the third year we’ll be following Euell Gibbons’ recipe. This is the third year we’ll be needing two one-gallon glass jugs with screw tops.

The first year, we discovered that, while the jugs themselves are cheap, the shipping is expensive. Since Jugs R Us (Google that at your peril) doesn’t yet have an outlet on Cape Cod, we would have had to pay about $30. for four of them.

Alternatively, we could buy them for $12.99 each, full of Carlo Rossi Chablis. It wasn’t a hard decision. That first year, we made it just as we started the wine-making process. Because the dandelions first have to steep for three days, and then the wine needs to ferment for a week, we had ten days before we needed the jugs to be empty.

The science of oenology has come a long way in the last decade or two, and cheap wine isn’t nearly as bad as it used to be. This is something I’ve been grateful for, as our seven-bottle-a-week habit (minus beer nights) precludes the regular consumption of expensive wine. But never have I been as grateful as when Kevin and I were faced with the prospect of downing two gallons of Carlo Rossi Chablis in a week and a half.

You’d think we would have learned our lesson that first go-round. The dandelions come up at the same time every year. We always know we’ll need two one-gallon glass jugs in the middle of May. We could get one gallon in, say, January, and another two months later. We could plan to make wine-intensive stews and soups to use up some of it. We could even branch out and try Carlo Rossi Burgundy.

But no. Last year, and then again this year, the first week in May finds us buying two gallons of Carlo Rossi Chablis, and trying to convince ourselves it’s really not that bad.

And you know, it really isn’t. It’s characterless, sure, but inoffensive. You could do worse.

Still, if any of you get a dinner invitation from us this week, consider this fair warning. I’ll understand if you’re busy.

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Kevin, coddling

They’ve been coddled and pampered, fed and pruned, warmed and lit. And now our domesticated milquetoasts can’t survive any other way. They need fertilized soil, full sun, and pest protection. And they need to be defended against their encroaching wild cousins, which can survive without any of those things, but will take them if they can get them.

I have a grudging admiration for wild plants. They’re scrappy survivors, depending on nothing and no one. They make it through cold years and wet years, hot years and dry years. They grow, unassisted, in Carver Coarse Sand. They don’t succumb to the animals that eat them – they turn getting eaten to their advantage by sending seeds through the digestive systems of their oppressors intact so they can extend the family.

One of their strategies for world domination is to get a head start. Early in spring, before most of us have a green thing in the garden, when our cold-weather crops are still in the seed starter and our warm weather crops are a dim prospect, wild plants are already well on their way.

Take chickweed (please!). Chickweed isn’t like chick lit or chick flicks – there’s nothing frothy or ephemeral about it. It’s more Terminator – uproot it as often as you like, but it will most definitely be back. I’ve been pulling it in my hoophouse for weeks now, and I found a specimen today that was actually flowering. Flowering! In March!

To my mind, the best revenge we can take on wild plants that invade our personal space is to eat them. And every year since I’ve started getting my food first-hand, early spring has found my thoughts turning to the little green shoots coming up all over Cape Cod.

 I will admit that my foraging efforts have, thus far, been lackluster. I love the idea of eating wild plants but I have not found all that many wild plants worth eating. Once you get used to the sissified domesticated plants, it’s hard to go back.

When you find an edible wild plant, you want it to be delicious. You went outside with your guidebook, you searched through the woods or along the beach, and through some combination of luck, fortitude, and cunning, you found something you could eat – right there! Ta-da!

You bring it home in triumph, and prepare it according to instructions from Euell “Try Anything” Gibbons, or maybe the Internet. You plate it, and serve it to your husband, who tries valiantly not to look skeptical. You take a bite. He takes a bite. It’s not terrible, but it’s not green beans. Or strawberries. And it’s certainly not a beautiful, high-summer Brandywine tomato.

Russ Cohen, edible plant guy

Still, every spring, I get the foraging bug. So the foraging lecture, put on at Highfield Hall in Falmouth this past Thursday, and featuring edible plant maven Russ Cohen, was timed well. I went, I listened, I took notes.

Russ Cohen has been eating the landscape for almost four decades, and he whipped through photographs of edible leaves, roots, flowers, and mushrooms for over an hour. He was clearly knowledgeably and openly enthusiastic. And he passed the Purslane Test.

To my mind, purslane is to foragers what litmus is to pH. What someone says about purslane is the key to his mindset about wild plants. If he says it is edible and ubiquitous, and that you can put some of it in a salad, he is a reasonable person, and it is safe to conclude that you can trust his judgment on other wild plants.

If, on the other hand, he tells you purslane is delicious, he has clearly drunk the elderberry Kool-Aid, and you should walk away.

Dreaded purslane

Purslane is certainly edible. It is certainly ubiquitous. It is certainly, emphatically, unequivocally not delicious. It tastes like grass clippings, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not to be relied on.

Russ Cohen passed the Purslane Test, so I bought his book.

And yesterday I went out to see if I couldn’t find me some cattail shoots.

I told Kevin I was going on a foraging junket and asked him if he wanted to come.

“What are you going for?”

“Cattails.”

He got this look on his face, a kind of cross between skepticism and incredulity. “Cattails? What do you want cattails for?” Kevin has been on the receiving end of enough foraging trips to be entitled to a little doubt.

“The shoots,” I said. “They’re supposed to be good.”

His face didn’t brighten at the prospect of cattail shoots, and I told him he didn’t have to come.

My cattail patch

“Oh, I’m coming,” he said, in a tone that suggested he wanted to be there not so much for the adventure (such as it is), but to make sure I didn’t bring home some other abomination that he would then have to eat.

We drove out to my designated cattail patch, which is along the shore of Cotuit Bay. Turns out it’s too early for cattail shoots here on the Cape, but it was a nice day – cold, but sunny – and we had a lovely walk along the shore. Maybe the best possible foraging outcome is an excellent walk, without the necessity of pretending that your wild harvest is as good as green beans or strawberries.

While there are wild plants that are genuinely tasty – we’ve had day-lily shoots and hen-of-the-wood mushrooms that I wouldn’t trade for anything in the grocery store – I think our natural landscape has somehow cottoned on to the idea that being delicious is not in its best interest. Word gets out, and next thing you know humans descend and devour – and the seeds that pass through us are unlikely to do it any good.

If you’re interested in world domination, you can’t be going extinct.

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I could be wrong, but I think this is because we are inveterate scavengers who will eat absolutely anything. Which is why, when our friend Geri saw her neighbor accidentally hit a wild turkey, she called us.

Turkey plumage

“We have a wild turkey that got hit by a car,” she said. “Do you want it?”

Do we want it? Hell yes we want it.

Geri and her husband, Emory, live about a mile away from us, on the pond that abuts our pond. They live in one of those beautiful, spotless houses that make people like me, and houses like mine, look very bad. They’re also very nice people. Emory is a scientist who studies fish populations, and both he and Geri have given extensively of their time and expertise to preserve the ponds we live on.

I’ll admit, though, that our first encounter with Emory and Geri left us scratching our heads.

It was when we first moved here, and didn’t know a soul. One morning a car we didn’t recognize came down the driveway, and two people we didn’t recognize got out of it. They introduced themselves, and then asked us if we had a boat.

Well, yes, we had a boat. We had a little skiff in the pond.

Emory explained that they were in the middle of an all-out effort to eradicate purple loosestrife, an invasive species that loves waterfronts. There was a very large specimen a couple hundred yards north of us, on the water, and they needed a boat to get there so they could dig it up.

Sure, we could help with that.

“Great!” said Emory, with real enthusiasm. He opened the trunk of his car and pulled out an axe the size of Rhode Island.

We took the boat up to the offending plant, and Emory went at it with a will.

I’ll confess to being alarmed. For starters, Emory is not in the first flush of youth, and he was wielding a very heavy tool, and using it with great vigor. But I also couldn’t help but notice that we were hacking down a tree on our neighbor’s property.

“Um … Emory?” I interrupted his hacking. “Isn’t this our neighbor’s property?”

“That’s OK,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “We have permission from the town.”

“But not the neighbor?”

Not the neighbor. Emory assured me it was all above-board and legal, but all I could picture was the neighbor, whom we hadn’t even met yet, coming out and finding the people who just moved in next door standing on his dock, cutting down his bushes.

Kevin took advantage of the break in the action to take over the hacking. Although Kevin is not in the first flush of youth either, he’s fundamentally incapable of standing around watching someone else do hard work.

We managed to get the purple loosestrife out without incurring the neighbor’s wrath (I think the house was empty at the time), and we took the boat back to our house. Emory put Rhode Island back in the trunk and thanked us for our help. Then he and Geri drove off.

We have since learned that Geri and Emory are responsible citizens, friendly neighbors, and interesting people, but at the time we thought there was a real chance they were insane axe murderers.

Since we’ve learned the truth, we can go to their house without fear, so we drove over to pick up the turkey.

Emory had it in a wheelbarrow in the garage (even their garage is spotless), and we all stood there looking at it for a few moments. It was small, for a wild turkey, but its feathers were beautiful and iridescent.

“That’ll make quite a few meals,” Emory said, and shook his head with a laugh, “If you’re hungry enough.” I think he couldn’t quite believe that we’d take, and eat, roadkill. It is a testament to their generous natures that he and Geri would bother to collect the turkey, put it in their garage, and call us to see if we wanted it.

Last-minute plucker adjustments

By the time we got it home it was getting dark, so we ran an extension cord and set up the plucker inside. There was also a howling wind, so we put the propane burner in the outdoor shower, where we could use it to heat the scalding water in relative calm.

It was a good practice run for this coming Sunday, when our turkeys will meet their maker, and it went off with only one little hitch – the plucker seems to have either a weak motor or an overheating problem, or perhaps both. We’ll try and straighten it out before Sunday, but the worst-case scenario is only hand plucking, so we’ll manage even if we can’t get it running perfectly.

The plucked, cleaned, turkey is now resting in the back of the fridge. Tomorrow we’ll figure out what we want to do with it.

Anybody else out there with roadkill? We’d like to be your first call.

11/20 CORRECTION: The original post erroneously said that invasive species hacked out by our neighbors was gray willow. It wasn’t. It was purple loosestrife. Thanks, Geri, for setting me straight.

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The bill is for its scale, not its value

I’ve logged many miles on the trails of the Eagle Pond conservation area, in Cotuit, and I’ve learned where the good mushrooms are likely to be found. This morning, though, I found a monster bolete where I’d never seen one before. It had two cousins, right nearby, but they were a little over the hill.

Trouble is, I’m not sure exactly what kind of bolete it is. I harbored a faint hope that it was a king bolete (or cep), but I think the stalk is too deeply netted for that. The flesh has a very slight bitterness to it, and doesn’t stain. The cap is smooth and not sticky.

If you have any clues as to its identification, please let me know. Meanwhile, if you see somebody jogging along at a snail’s pace, wave!

A later-in-the-day postscript:  I sauteed it, hoping the cooking would make that slight bitterness disappear.  No such luck.  It was so bitter as to be inedible.  I still don’t know what kind of bolete it is, but I can tell you it’s not the eating kind.  Bah.

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I think this is why steamers, popular in this neck of the woods, never caught on anywhere else. No matter what you do, steamers always, always, always have sand in them. You can scrub them scrupulously. You can swish them til the cows come home. There will always be sand. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes it’s less, but there’s always some.

It’s part of the experience, and it’s also a test. If you can’t stand a little sand in your clams, you don’t belong here.

Today, I harvested my first day lily shoots. Last spring, thanks to Euell “Try Anything” Gibbons, we discovered that they make excellent eating. We happened on a patch of them near the herring run in Dennis, and we brought home enough to make a side dish for the lamb ragout I was planning for dinner.

I washed them carefully. I did. I removed every speck of dirt I could see. I cut them up, I steamed them, I mixed in just a little butter. I ate one.

It was delicious, mild, a bit oniony, still with a little bite. But there was that crunch, crunch, crunch of grit. I thought maybe I just got a bad one, and I took another. Same thing.

Day lilies are built like leeks, and dirt can work itself farther down between the leaves than you ever thought possible. At least farther than I ever thought possible.

I ate a few, and Kevin ate a few, but we just couldn’t do it. The rest are going to the chickens, who have a use for grit in their food. Unless some real New Englanders would like them.

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And the finding of them isn’t the only difficulty with steamers. Once you encounter a bona fide steamer hole, you still have to get the steamer out without breaking its shell. This isn’t easy. The rakes made for steamer digging are short handled, with tines at a right angle to the handle. You kneel on the beach, dig out the sand in front of the suspect hole, take a layer of sand off right above the suspected clam (being careful not to go too deep), and then use your hands to try and locate the steamer. Once you’ve done that, you still have to pry the thing out of the wet sand, a hospitable home he has no inclination to leave.

Digging up a steamer clam from Tamar Haspel on Vimeo.

I have only a tenuous grasp of the physical laws that account for the sucking vacuum behind a clam you’re trying to pull out of wet sand, but I have vast experience with the sucking vacuum itself. Electrolux should be so lucky.

All this by way of saying we had good reason to marvel at the two-peck haul of the guys at Bay Street.

Naturally, we struck up a conversation, hoping to wheedle their secrets out of them. One of their secrets, though, was lying in plain sight in the bed of their pick-up. It looked a lot like a toilet plunger.

“Hey,” I said, with the grace and subtlety that mark all my encounters with strangers, “What’s with the toilet plunger?”

This was one secret they were perfectly willing to share. They described how, when you get to a fertile steamer ground, you use the plunger to dig a kind of crater in the seabed (you use it under water), and the clams just drift up with with sand you displace. You scoop them up with a net, and Bob’s your uncle.

And just where was their particular fertile steamer ground? That, they weren’t telling. I understood.

Ever since then, I’ve been wanting to try the plunge method of clamming. It turns out that purveyors of shellfishing equipment actually sell something called a “clam plunger,” which looks suspiciously like a toilet plunger except that it has a longer stick and a net attached to the non-plunging end. Overall, it looked like the kind of thing we could improvise.

We have a stick. We have a net. And, of course, we have a toilet plunger.

Anyone who either knows me personally or follows this space understands that I am loath to buy anything I can cobble together out of stuff that’s lying around. The clam plunger was just begging to be cobbled. We had all the parts, and the duct tape to cobble them, but even I draw the line somewhere. Call me doctrinaire, but I think anything that’s used in the toilet should not be used in food procurement.

We bought a brand new toilet plunger, and headed out to our very own fertile steamer ground with it, stick, and net. We also brought our conventional gear, just in case.

We had discovered our steamer ground accidentally. We’d gone out for quahogs, but we kept spearing the soft-shell clams with our wicked, long-tined quahog rakes. Exactly where was that, you may ask? I’m not telling, and I know you’ll understand.

We got to our super-secret steamer spot, and Kevin waded out ankle-deep. We found an area that looked to have some steamer holes, and he started plunging. After two or three plunges, he came up empty. No clams, of course, but also no plunger. It had come off the aluminum pole and lodged itself in the sand. The threading on the end of the pole apparently wasn’t a perfect match with the threading on the inside collar of the plunger.

The same physical laws that create the sucking vacuum behind a clam apply to plungers, and it took a good deal of effort to dislodge it. Once we did, we put it back on the stick it came with, and tried again.

It works as advertised, more or less. The plunging creates a crater, and much of the sand and silt you dislodge floats away on the current. A great deal of it, though, seems to settle back in the hole, which we couldn’t make deep enough to reach the clams, which are usually about six to eight inches below the surface.

Whether the hole depth was the problem, or the clamlessness of the spot, we don’t know. We do know that we didn’t plunge up a single clam. We ditched the plunger and went back to the rakes.

Dinner, and then some

None of last year’s steamering excursions had been entirely satisfactory. The clams had been few and far between, and what there had been tended to be below legal size (two inches long). Although we’d never been completely skunked, the ratio of effort invested to clams harvested always seemed a bit high. This, our new fertile clamming ground, made for a much better experience — once we gave up on plunging. Most of the holes that looked like steamer holes proved to be just that, and Kevin and I both got much better at finding them and dislodging them without breaking their shells. Although we had a few casualties and a few shorts, we went home with five dozen steamers.

We had them for lunch, steamed and dipped in butter, accompanied by cole slaw and beer. 

It wasn’t only the clams, though, that made it such a fine morning. There were signs that winter was finally on the wane — fish were jumping, trees were budding. It was warm enough that I didn’t need a hat. The sun was out. It was a joy to be on the beach, clamming with my husband, looking forward to spring.

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Last May, we made our very first batch of dandelion wine. Up until then, the only fermenting I’d ever done was accidental, a result of leaving fruit juice, or black beans, or cooked barley sitting in the refrigerator too long. As this was our first attempt at deliberate fermentation, we followed the recipe from Euell “Try Anything” Gibbons pretty much to the letter.

At the time, I was unconvinced that dandelions had anything to do with dandelion wine. Oh sure, you start with a bunch of dandelions, but then you add things like oranges and lemons and sugar and ginger, which are all way more delicious than dandelions. I suspected that the whole dandelion part – which involves hours of backbreaking labor and many, many insects – was just inserted into the recipe to build character.

Now I’m not so sure.

The glass looked clean at the time ...

Last night, we broke out the dandelion wine, which has been aging for almost ten months. There are two gallon jugs of it in the basement, but we reserved one small bottle that we keep in the kitchen so we can taste it without disturbing the jugs. Or shlepping to the basement.

First, we took a good hard look at it. It’s not completely clear, although it’s clearer than it was when we bottled it. It could be my imagination, but there’s a faint residue on the sides of the bottle that looks remarkably like pollen. In color, it’s like the dishwater you washed the orange juice glasses in. Which is not to say it’s unappetizing; it looks like something you can drink.

We each took a sip. It has a faint effervescence and a pronounced (surprise!) citrus flavor, but it also has very decided vegetal overtones that balance the sweetness and fruity flavor. I was forced to conclude that dandelion wine does indeed require dandelions.

Which means, come May, we’re in for another few hours of backbreaking work. It’s not ready for prime time yet, but we’re happy enough with our 2009 vintage to want to try it again for 2010.

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Our driveway. See the truck at the very top?

Nothing like two feet of snow to bring home to you that it’s winter. And, in winter, our food procurement efforts grind virtually to a halt. The eggs keep coming, but after that the pickings are slim. We can shellfish year-round, an unusually nice day might find us going after trout, and I keep hoping Kevin gets a hankering to go rabbit hunting, but that’s about it.

I figured this would be a good time to take inventory. We’re not technically snowed in; the truck is at the mouth of our 500-foot driveway, and we can hike up there and leave the premises any time we want. But the hike is enough to make you think twice about going anywhere, so we’re planning to make good use of our laid-in supplies.

Which got me wondering. I’m planning to continue the one-food-a-day challenge into next year, and winter is the toughest time. Last year, it was all shellfish, all the time, but this year I’ve got a few items socked away. Here’s what we’ve got to see us through to spring:

The canned goods:

2 12-ounce jars of the blackberry/anise jam Mary and I made from Dianne’s blackberries
1 12-ounce jar of Jane’s raspberry jam
1 12-ounce jar of Mary’s rhubarb jam
4 12-ounce jars of red pepper jelly (which dates back to our Manhattan life)

The frozen goods:
(“Bag” means a 1-quart Ziploc bag. It may or may not be completely full, but let’s not split hairs.)

5 bags parboiled butternut squash
8 small smoked bluefish fillets
2 bags diced roasted eggplant
2 bags parboiled beet greens
3 pounds Linda and Dan’s cranberries
9 bags Christl’s Sasquash (a bland, orange squash), diced
7 bags diced tomatoes
1 quart prickly pear juice
1 bag chopped jalapeno peppers
4 bags parboiled collard greens
1 bag sautéed painted suillus mushrooms
1 bag sautéed hen-of-the-wood mushrooms
4 dozen oysters
1 pound Dan’s Alaskan halibut
3 pints chopped clams
3 bags smoked trout
1 pint strawberry-rhubarb compote, from Christl’s rhubarb
1 quart crab stock
1 bag Dianne’s raspberries and blackberries
1 pint clam sauce
1 pint clam juice

The indoor herbs, still hanging on

The living goods (which may or may not still be living in a month or two):

Parsley
Sage
Rosemary
Chives (no thyme)

The rest of the goods:

Sea salt
Bay leaves
A few dried jalapenos
¼ cup dried hot pepper flakes
Eggs
Wintergreen extract
1 bucket Geri’s herring preserved in salt, awaiting pickling
2 gallons of dandelion wine (we want to let this age, but if things get dire…)

It’s not a bad list, but when you think about how long it has to last, it seems a bit anaemic. Other than the winter fare, we won’t have any new items until April, when the first of the wild green edibles come up.

Although I did manage to dig up a sassafras root before the snow came, so I’m ready to try that root beer again …

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The slush stage

At the opposite end of the difficulty spectrum is sea salt production. It requires very little work and absolutely no expertise. All we have to do is get some sea water and put it in a pan on top of our wood stove, so it’s hard for me to explain our fascination with the process. The first time we did it, in the dead of last winter, Kevin and I stood in front of the wood stove for minutes at a time, staring at a pan of evaporating water.

We’ve just started our second year of production, and we’re still fascinated. And it’s not just us. People who know us and follow what we’re doing seem to think that our sea salt manufacturing is our most interesting undertaking. Mushroom foraging raises a few eyebrows, but that’s mostly because people think eating wild mushrooms is a benign form of lunacy. Lobstering is old hat to Cape Codders, and chickens only get us a polite smile. But sea salt!

It caught the fancy of my friend Elspeth, who writes Diary of Locavore and does the Local Food Report for our Cape NPR station, WCAI. Not only did she do a radio spot on it (and me, for which I thank her), she tried it at home. Her husband, Alex, is a serious food guy (if you’re ever in Wellfleet, visit Mac’s Seafood), and he reportedly caught the sea salt bug. “He’s been keeping the house at 110 degrees so he can make more of it,” Elspeth said.

I was also recently invited to speak at a gardening forum at Cape Cod Community College, and the organizer emphasized the sea salt portion of the program. “I know you do a lot of things,” Aimee said, “but make sure you talk about the salt.”

In a way, I find this very gratifying. In another way, not so much. “Hey!” I want to say. “I go out on a small boat in lousy weather to haul 50-pound lobster traps up from the bottom of the bay. Don’t you want to hear about that?

In a word, no. It’s all about the salt.

Making sea salt, step one from Tamar Haspel on Vimeo.

“Does it come out gray?” I’ve been asked, many times. The first time I did it, I thought it would, and was very surprised when it dried to a pure snowy white.

“Is it safe to eat?” is generally the next question. I suspect, in the history of the world, nobody’s ever gotten sick from salt for the simple reason that it can’t support life. There are all kinds of microorganisms in the water, but they die as it evaporates. There are other things dissolved in the water – minerals and inorganic compounds – and they don’t go away. If I re-dissolve my salt in water, there is a little residue (mostly calcium carbonate, I suspect), but it’s hard to come up with a scenario in which it’s going to do me harm.

“Can I just boil the water to get the salt?” ask people who don’t have wood stoves. Of course you can, but it doesn’t make sense. Energy is expensive and salt is cheap. This is only worth doing if the energy involved is going begging. If we got more sun, I’d try a solar version in the summer.

The finished product

It’s reassuring to me that we’re not the only ones who find this interesting, but I still can’t put my finger on exactly what it is that holds our attention. It may be that, even though we’ve all known since elementary school that salt dissolves in water, the miracle of something useful materializing out of bucket of water still captivates us.

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How do you suppose the prickly pear got its name?

This is another press trip, and yesterday morning I had an hour or so with nothing on the schedule. If there’s one thing you learn on these junkets, it’s that you should take every possible opportunity to get some exercise, because you’re going to spend the rest of the day sitting around, eating. So I went for a walk.

Growing in front of an office building around the corner from my hotel was a giant prickly pear cactus studded with fruit, which I think of as prickly pears but which are actually known as cactus figs. I had to have one.

The spines on the prickly pear are easy to avoid. They’re large, obvious and evenly spaced, and I reached carefully down between them and plucked a cactus fig. That’s when I discovered that the prickly pear has a second line of defense. The fruits themselves have clumps of diabolical little hairy spines, which I subsequently found out have a special name – glochids.

Glochids are to spines what guerilla tactics are to conventional warfare. They’re stealthy and unexpected, and they get you just when you think you’re in the clear. They detach from their clump readily, and implant themselves in your skin. They’re small enough to be almost invisible, but they certainly know how to make their presence known. I spent half the morning trying to pick at least twenty of them out of my hands.

Once you get past the glochids, it’s all good. The prickly pear (I’m sticking with the name, because other people seem to) has that tropical flavor, like a passionfruit or a starfruit, but is much sweeter. It also has a lovely deep-purple color.

When I asked people what to do with it, just about everyone said “margaritas!” But that seems to be the answer to a lot of questions around here. I think it has something to do with the uncomfortable chairs.

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