Prickly Pear Disaster - Week Four

 

If you have been following this blog recently you know that Judith and I have been doing some foraging. Mostly we look for mushrooms but have also had some success finding wild berries and greens, and the occasional fruit. Well now that we are in Palm Springs (which is in the middle of the desert) I suggested we go pick some prickly pear.

Prickly Pear is a flowering cactus, and the entire plant is edible. The fruit has a pleasant watermelon-like flavour. The cactus has flat, rounded “lobes” called cladodes containing large, smooth, fixed spines and small, hairlike prickles called glochids. The fruit also has these spines – but they are less visible, so before Judith and I realized what was happening, we both began saying ow, ouch, ooo shit, ouch! 

When I realized the gravity of our situation (as in just how many freaking spikes were imbedded in my hands), I tried using my teeth to pull the big clusters out. This my friends, is likely the stupidest thing I have ever done.

So, for the next couple of hours, Judith and I took turns with the tweezers carefully trying to pull out the thousands of almost invisible but painful spikes from our fingers and palms - all the while my tongue is hanging out of my mouth and I am drooling. It soon became clear, however, that tweezers were not going to do the trick, so out came the duct tape! 

Nope – that didn’t work either.

Judith managed to get enough out of one of her hands that she was able to Google remedies for stupid people who picked prickely pear fruit without gloves, and that sent us off to meet our RV neighbours in search of some Elmer’s glue.

We were quite a sight – both hands covered in a gooey coat of glue – waiting for it to dry so we could carefully pull the dried glue off like dead skin – in the hopes the spiky tidbits thoroughly lodge in our hands would come out. It worked!

Then there was the issue of the tongue….Glue is water soluble (and less than delicious). Nope. Duct tape does not stick to tongues – tried it. So into the bathroom we went armed with a cell phone flashlight and the tweezers. Problem is prickly pear spikes look remarkably like tastebuds....sigh.

&%$@!

I gave up on the tweezers and moved on to my electric toothbrush…nope. Next up was rubbing my tongue and lips hard with the washcloth and much to my surprise it worked! (either that or my tongue was so numb from rubbing that I couldn’t feel it anymore). 

Either way, I convinced myself that the spines in my tongue would best be dealt with by swishing a large quantity of wine around in my mouth and swallowing.

Cheers!