Pricly Pear Fruit Jam

Our neighbors have a TON of prickly pear plants lining their front yard. I thought it would be fun to try and make some jam with the fruits. I took the boys over last Sunday to pick a peck. These are five gallon buckets, each about half full. You couldn't even tell we had picked any off their plants when we were through. Very prolific!

Cleaning and cutting up the fruit was A LOT more work than I had anticipated. Our first attempt, we were wearing heavy gloves, slicing the fruits open, and scooping out, first the seeds(to scrap), then the fruit pulp out of the skin. Two hours later, we had enough for a batch that we ended up burning. Back to the drawing board!

I had done a little reading up on the prickly pear fruit cleaning, and read that you could first burn them to get rid of the hairy prickles. So, we put them in the forge for a few seconds, holding them with tongs, and rolling them slightly. Perfect, and WAY quicker!! Now we could cut off the ends, score the skin, and peel it off. Then slice lengthwise and remove all the seeds. About 60 fruits ended up with a four jar batch of jam.

After the fruit was all cleaned and ready, we put it in the blender to make it nice and smooth. Sugar, lemon juice and rind, and a little grated ginger, and into the pot to cook for at least an hour. Doug is quite the little chef, and was really excited when our second batch turned out good.
We still have a ton of fruits left, so we can make prickly pear smoothies, pancakes, oatmeal, and maybe some more jam! Don't know how long they'll keep, so I think we'll clean and blend, then freeze. We might try to make some dye with all the seed stuff and peels. I'm looking into that ;-) Prickly pear tie dyes!

Turned out pretty tasty!!! A little too lemony for Max's taste, but I thought it was awesome over some Haagen Dasz 5 Ginger ice cream ;-) I probably could have cooked it down a little longer to thicken more, but I was paranoid of the burning. A few more batches, and I should have it down :-)