This recipe offers a taste of cactus

Photos by Chris Richards / Staff Chef Francisco Ruiz harvests prickly pear pads, or nopales, behind La Fuente restaurant. Scrape the spines off the pads before cooking them.

One of those greens is fresh, young gisoki, or prickly pear, that can be prepared with red chile, mixed into eggs or salads, or eaten plain with a touch of onion or garlic salt.

In Spanish, the food is called nopalitos.

You can find cooked nopalitos in jars in the Mexican food section of grocery stores. They can be mixed with red chile sauce and diced garlic in a frying pan, and served with hot flour tortillas.

Or, if you want to, pick and prepare the gisoki or nopales yourself if you have prickly pear growing in your back yard or a friend's back yard. Cutting cactus pads or harvesting fruit is legal, but only on private property and with the owner's permission.

Be sure to have an adult help you. Pick the older pads by cutting them with a sharp knife at the base of the pad, or pick the younger, tender pads that grow after heavy rains - especially during our monsoon season. Be careful with the spines.

With an adult's supervision, place the old pads over a fire - either a campfire or grill fire, or the flame of a gas burner on a stove - and burn the spines, then scrape them off with a knife. The young leaflets have immature, soft thorns that can just be scraped off the leaf using the knife.

Once the pads are free of spines, rinse them and then slice them in small strips. Place the strips in boiling water. The pads release a sticky substance and must be boiled three times in three changes of water.

In the last boil, you can add half an onion and a head of garlic to the water. After a high boil, remove the nopalitos and rinse them in cold water. The pads have a vinegary, sour pickle taste, and can be eaten plain with a touch of salt or mixed into salads. Another favorite is mixing nopalitos with fresh or stewed tomatoes and spices such as garlic or onion salt.

Nopalitos are also commonly eaten in omelets or scrambled eggs.

Freshly boiled nopalitos can remain covered for up to several days in the refrigerator.

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