This week we explored the foods of the desert, where water is life. In the classroom, the fourth and fifth graders watched a short film called Birdsong Guides A Tribe Home featuring modern Cahuilla people talking about preserving their Indigenous cultural traditions in what is now known as Palm Springs in Southern California. We learned that Indigenous peoples made chewing gum from prickly pears, dried the fruits for storage and sustenance during the winter, and used the spines for tattooing. In the film, we observed the traditional roasting of agave, a succulent some of us were familiar with in syrup form that is marketed as a natural sweetener.
In the kitchen, we made two recipes: a prickly pear soda and a cactus pad salsa. A friend of our program harvested the prickly pear fruits for us in Sonoma County before class, and we blowtorched the spines off as best we could before the students worked with them. Student cut the fruits in half, scooped out the flesh, then pressed it through a strainer to extract the juice and leave out the seeds. We added sparkling water and agave syrup to the resulting deep magenta puree to make a refreshing soda that tasted even better with a splash of lime added right before serving.
The fourth and fifth graders diced and blanched the nopales before mixing them with the other salsa ingredients: tomatoes, onion, garlic, lime, salt, pepper, ground cumin, oregano, and fresh cilantro harvested straight from our classroom garden. We enjoyed the salsa with corn chips from local food producer Sabor Mexicano.
