Tuna Time in Texas

 As Cape Cod still runs through my veins, hearing “tuna time” I, of course, think of tuna, as in the fish; the really large fish that we once went to see being hauled in on a winter day in Chatham.  The small fishing boat was coated in ice, and the tuna, which weighed over 500 lbs. seemed clearly capable of tipping it over.  Just recently someone caught a 900 plus tuna off the Cape for some Tuna Reality show. Only trick was, there were no cameras on board at the time.  But I digress.

“Tuna” time in Texas doesn’t require you to be at sea, or to have an ice covered boat or a whale of a struggle with a huge fish.  Rather, “tunas” here refer to the magenta fruit that are ripening on the Prickly Pear as we speak.  You have no doubt seen them in pictures, and perhaps you know that they are loaded with Vit.C, calcium and phosphorous.  If you are a Texan, you might also know that, as of 1995, the Prickly Pear, Opuntia engelmanni   was chosen  the Texas State Plant.  It does have a zillion different uses and is said to have kept many a creature, including humans, from starving in tough times.

I have been reading about how to make a juice from them, but after reading about it, I don’t think I will chose this as a way to make up for my missing apple picking in Texas.   

You need to use some sort of tong to pick them off the plant, as being a cactus means nasty spines.  The ones you have to worry about aren’t the large obvious spines, but much smaller fine ones called “glochids” which dislodge easily and can go airborne  

ending up in your skin or yikes, eyes, where their barbed ends, like porcupine quills will embed them wherever they land.

Once you pick them, you mash and strain them through a pillowcase, toss out the pulp left behind and enjoy the juice added to lemonade.  On the Cape we used to make lemonade from the Staghorn Sumac in much the same way, minus the “lose your eyesight” glochids.  However, native cultures have been eating tunas for 1,000’s of years so maybe this web page was just into making it sound scarier than it is.

It turns out I have eaten Prickly Pear in a restaurant without knowing it.  The Spanish word for the pads of the Prickly pear is “napalito” and they were really yummy, sliced into strips and slightly tart atop a meal I had gotten. I have a jar of them in my cupboard for adding to a casserole someday.

The Prickly Pear, it turns out, is one of those plants where every part has a use for one thing or another.  A great book on Texas Plants is one called “Remarkable Plants of Texas” by Matt Turner and he goes on for pages about the myriad of ways this plant has been used through the ages.  Pads could make a pocket for steaming fish or be used as a source of stored water for all native animals.  The spines were used as dart tips to hunt birds, the mucilaginous mass in the pads mixed with turbid water could remove dirt by sinking it to the bottom and leaving the clear water on top, plus a lengthy list of medicinal uses are cataloged in his book.  So, one can see how it came to this place of honor as a Texas symbol.

And, just as an example of how we modern people have lost our ability to appreciate delayed gratification, there is a story in Turner’s book of the explorer, Cabeza de Vaca living among the coastal Indians.  It was winter and food was scarce but the Indians told him to cheer up, it would soon be tuna time.  Soon meaning in about 5 months time! 

So, even though I may not go gathering tunas on my own, I shall think highly of the plant every time I pass it on my walk and watch to see how long these tunas last before some animal with less aversion to glochids makes it their meal.  Meanwhile, a tuna fish sandwich anyone?