Yucca Season Now, Prickly-Pears Finishing

I was told by a neighbor that in her childhood her mother used to cook parts of the yucca blossom with eggs. Right now the yucca plants around my place are blooming and so I gave it a try, fried up some centers (as she told me to do) with a scrambled egg and it was not bad. Tasted slightly like asparagus, but chewy.

So today when I came online I googled "yucca blossom recipes" and found this (scroll past the ads):
How to Eat Yucca: 4 Steps - wikiHow

I will now go on to experiment a little more with this, feeling brave because of this past winter of successful prickly-pear (cactus)experiments.

Here's a better link for yucca:
http://www.pennilessparenting.com/2012/08/foraging-yucca-blossoms-wild-edibles.html

I picked my last batch of prickly-pear cactus as the fruiting season seems to be winding down and the cactus is now starting to sprout new pads and blossom buds. I took a big branch of it, too, to try to grow it in a container because there is danger of the local bulldozer-crazies wrecking my patch. They destroyed a favorite one a month or so ago.

List of things I made with prickly-pears, all very very good to eat even without an apocalyptic social collapse :

1. juice
2. syrup
3. frosting
4. flavored sugar cookies
5. flavored crepes
6. pies
7. wine (really, it's just a mild cider)

All the prickly pear needed was some sugar. Once you get the hang of handling them without getting too many needles and also the hang of removing the tiny needles from your hands, they are just like regular pears and can be used in any fruit recipe. The needles are in the skin and it helps to wear a tight-fitting pear of leather or vinyl garden gloves when peeling them. For juice, just slive them and toss them into the juicer and then pour it off after letting the needles that sneak through settle to the bottom.

Anyone else trying these two plants that are so often found together?