Prickly pear pads prepared

When I first met Millie Gonzales, she reined up the palomino horse she was riding, said her how-do-you-dos and offered me a tamale. It was not a holiday, nor any special occasion for that matter, but she had just made a batch of tamales at the drop of a hat.

Millie’s like that.

A Yuma native with a deep reverence for the elderly and the old ways, she cooks outside over a mesquite fire, or whips up tamales, tortillas and nopalitos the way the her elders taught her.

Now that it’s summertime and nopales are sprouting, Millie can sometimes be seen in her front yard, harvesting tender, young sprouts to cook for the four generations of family that regularly congregate in her kitchen.

“The nopales that I have always used are these that I have (growing). Now they’re using any kind of a nopal, like you see cut up in plastic bags in the grocery stores, or that you buy from the street vendors in Mexico. There are nopales that have what looks like pigs’ ears; they’re pointed. I have never used those because they’re thinner, and they have more thorns than the kind I have.”

Nopalitos (no-pah-LEE-tohs) is the Spanish word for small pieces of sliced or diced nopales (no-PAH-lehs) or prickly pear pads that are harvested from nopal plants and are commonly prepared in stews, sauces and salads by the Hispanic and American Indian peoples of the Southwest.

From the towering nopal plants in her yard, Millie selects only tender, young sprouts that are about five or six inches long. Holding a sprout with a long set of barbecue tongs, she cuts it off with a long butcher knife.

“The older they are, the more fibrous and tougher they become. But if you’re starving, you’ll eat them, and they’ll sustain you. Very poor people eat the bigger ones because they don’t have much else to eat.

“I’ve heard that in the old days, almost everyone in Yuma had nopales growing all around their yards, like a fence.”

One type of prickly pear that grows wild in the Yuma area is the beavertail cactus, but it is protected under the Arizona Native Plant Law, according to Karen Reichhardt, a botanist with the Bureau of Land Management in Yuma. However, one variety of edible cactus called Opuntia ficus-indica can be purchased, planted and harvested, Reichhardt says.

Millie learned how to harvest and prepare nopales from watching her aunts, Lucy Amavisca and Lula Ortega, and her uncle, Augustine Ortega. “That’s where I learned to peel them with an extremely small, sharp paring knife or pocketknife."

Although she learned to trim off one thorn at a time, she has since devised a faster method. She anchors a nopal to a plate with a fork and uses a box cutter to score a line down either side of a row of thorns. Then she angles the blade under the thorns between the score marks and carves out a row at a time.

“The longer the knife, the harder it is to handle because you want to be closer to your work, and with (a box cutter) I can get real, real close. And I can easily change the blade when I need to.”

After dethorning the nopales, Millie either slices or dices the desired amount and blanches them in salted boiling water for about five minutes.

“They emit a gelatin-like substance when boiled, similar to okra. It’s sticky, so you want to drain that off in a colander and rinse the nopalitos really well.”

Next, she either freezes the nopalitos in plastic bags for later use, or she adds them to foods such as green chile, beans, pork with red chile sauce, eggs or salads. “Some people baste them with butter or olive oil and grill them like a steak,” she says.

“They taste bland, like an okra, or a green bean. If you use them like you’d use green beans, slice them. If you use them like you’d use okra, dice them up. You can even use them like you’d use a bell pepper, although bell pepper has its own flavor.

“Nopalitos will take on the flavor of the food you add them to. I like them. My family likes them. I can’t say they all like them, but the ones that like them really like the way I cook them.

“At my son-in-law’s parents’ house, my kids eat prime rib and all the trimmings. Here, they eat green chile with nopales and rice and beans,” she adds with a grin.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit I have reverence for Millie, my friend and former sister-in-law, who maintains cultural cooking traditions for her children as well as all the others who drop by to see “Aunt Millie,” “Nana Millie” or “Great-Grandma Millie.”

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Nancy Gilkey can be reached at nancygilkey@q.com, or 261-9144.