Cactus pear

Out of curiosity, I bought a cactus pear. All the time, I keep thinking that it's a species of pear that happens to look like cactus. When I come home to wash it to make a fruit salad with it, I start wondering how its waxy skin feels awfully like a cactus. After peeling off the skin, I can't resist taste-testing a slice of it. Oh! Though it's as sweet like any fruit can be, its sticky juice reminds me of cactus in every way. I end up with a mouthful of seeds that are hard as pebbles. I go online and check for cactus pear. True enough, it's the fruit of a cactus that happens to look like a pear, not the other way round! It's really a yummy surprise.

Skin of a cactus pear:

Head of a cactus pear:

Cross-section of a cactus pear:

Plenty of seeds in just a very very thin slice:

The next thing I'm going to do is to sow the seeds to grow some cactus at the kitchen's window sill.

Guess what this is!

It's cactus being grilled. I saw some cactus in the market, and was very curious about what to do with it. So I got a pack. Then, during one of the dinners with friends, we decided to try out grilling it. The tough part about handling cactus is the thorns. They are really tough to remove. Not that they stick to the leaf, but they poke my fingers a lot and it hurt. After some unsuccessful attempts to pull them off, I finally decided to just peel of the parts where the thorns grew out of the leaf. That was easier.

Once there is a cut on the leaf, juice would ooze out. So I had to work rather fast to remove all the thorns. Then I just coated both sides of the leaf with oil and placed it on the grill. It took about 10 minutes to caramelize each side. When it's cooked, it tasted surprising like green pepper!