food
inconvenient truth: the same plant that produces prickly pears is also the source of nopales, but you can't get both from the same plant because nopales have to be harvested before the fruit grows and the plant can't grow fruit after you take off the nopales (in fact I think it dies and has to be replanted?)
re: food
@noiob prickly pears are the fruit, nopales are grilled cactus pads
re: food
@noiob not necessarily grilled I guess, that's just how we've had them
just the pads of the cactus used as a vegetable. they're pretty good
re: food
@Felthry a lot of things can be called "nopal", apparently
re: food
@noiob yeah looking it up apparently it's just the Spanish word for the plant or something
re: food
@Felthry we don't have edible cacti here
re: food
@Felthry well, we don't have any cacti here, natively
re: food
@Felthry ah, there's also a ton of cacti known as prickly pear, and they hybridzise easily
re: food
@noiob yeah it's a whole genus i think? but it's like different varieties of apple, they're more like different flavors of the same fruit than anything
re: food
@Felthry I wonder if there's a way to get any of those around here, I wanna know how it tastes :D
re: food
@Felthry oh, a popular kind of ice tea here contains prickly pear
re: food
@noiob ooh really? that's neat :D
re: food
@Felthry 0.1% of it
re: food
@noiob probably not too much flavor then
re: food
@Felthry it's concentrate so it's probably more than it sounds like
re: food
@noiob you should look into it! Getting the actual fruit would probably be hard but I know prickly pear candy is popular in mexico and would probably be possible to import. might even be able to find it at a specialty grocery store!
re: food
@noiob https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004HZICGS?tag=duckduckgo-d-20&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1 example of prickly pear candy! this one's a sort of gummy candy, we've had it and it's good
they also make prickly pear jam and soda that you might be able to find too
re: food
@Felthry I mostly find weird supplements lol
re: food
@Felthry wikipedia says prickly pears and nopales are the same thing?