So, it sounds like I'm already stretching the definition of fruit or vegetable on day three. Well, I am slowly eating red and green tuna as we speak and there's nothing fishy about it. Spanish speakers often call it tuna, and in the store it was called a cactus pear, and the most common name seems to be prickly pear, which is the fruit of a cactus plant.
While reading up on this fruit I decided to use gloves to open it for two reasons. There can be tiny cactus spines that get stuck in the skin and cause serious irritation and with the red fruit it is quite easy to stain anything that comes in contact with the inside; I may never be able to use this paper plate or plastic fork again because of the stains.
The prickly pears are egg-shaped and about the size of my fist. The skins are lime green and pomegranate red respectively and I can see from google that they come in other colors as well. To prepare them I put my gloves on and cut the fruit in half lengthwise then peeled the skin off and discarded it. The green one has the shade of the inside of a watermelon rind and the texture and taste remind me of watermelon as well, but with a lot more seeds, which have the size and firmness of grape seeds. Some of them are brown and visible and some of them blend in with the fruit. I'm even getting seeds just by scraping the fruit with the edge of my front teeth to get a little taste of the fruit. The inside of the red prickly pear has a deep purplish-red color like a sugar beet. The texture and seeds are similar but the taste has a little something different. Neither one are overpowering in flavor and I think it would take a long time to finish eating them in the house. I think my plan will be to go outside to finish them where I can spit the seeds. This may be why the fruit is readily available throughout many continents; it may rely on its seeds being spit out all over the globe as we learn that it's really too much work to eat it. Humans have responded by eating other parts of the cactus as well. In Mexican cuisine nopales, the paddle shaped part of the cactus, is used in many different ways.
The fruit is rich in vitamin C, fiber, and magnesium (fiber seems to be a trend but I think that's half the point of eating all these fruits and vegetables. One sight recommends it for weight loss, possibly because you burn more calories than you take in as you work your way around all the blasted seeds. The greatest allergy risk is of course from the bristles which may cause dermatitis (which is only a generic term for inflammation of the skin). And of course I'll leave further research up to you and just like yesterday, here's a link to get you started in case you don't know how to use Google on your own.
Now I'm off to make a mess of my yard and to risk a cactus outbreak in my neighborhood from a plant that's actually become a pest species in Australia. But why not? We already have rabbits.
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