Happy Friday: Frugal Prickly Pear Jam
Sent from reader, Deborah:
Hey Collin – This is our third year in Tucson, where my husband is a doctoral student at the University of Arizona. As money is always tight, we look all year for great deals on items we can use as Christmas presents for friends and families. We are surrounded by desert and cactus, and each year by the end of the summer the prickly pears that are not eaten by animals go to waste. This year, we decided to save some money and some prickly pears at the same time.
We gathered prickly pears from cacti in the desert (free!), cleaned them up, and juiced them to make jams and jellies. To add variety, we bought some strawberries and peaches (ad-matching to ensure the cheapest price) to make, strawberry prickly pear jam and peach prickly pear jam. After doing the math, calculating the cost of the pectin, jars and the fruit, we estimated the jams cost just under $1 per jar. Now we have inexpensive, creative and unique novelty gifts of prickly pear jams and jellies for our friends and family members for Christmas, AND we can feel good about using nature’s resources! 🙂
HAPPY FRIDAY!
Do you have a funny, “Hip”, or unique photo to share?! Email us at happyfriday@hip2save(dot)com. Every Friday, I will post one photo, submitted by you and/or another Hip2Save reader, that gives us a glimpse into your frugal lifestyle or simply makes us smile. If your photo is published on Hip2Save, we’ll email you a $10 Amazon e-card!
** Check out all of the previous Happy Friday pictures here.
What a great idea! I’m intrigued by the prickly pears, never tasted them. What are they like?
Wow, how great to have all of those at your fingertips. Great idea to can, but did you think to juice them. They are called cactus pears, but in Spanish they are called Nopalitas or tunas. This is the same thing as that “Nopalea” juice that they sell on TV. It is one of the most antiinflammatory foods on the planet and fights tons of disease. We have several plants started in the backyard, and I cannot wait for them to give fruit – I am in the desert area of CA.
Prickly pear jelly is good but hard to compare to anything else which makes it difficult to describe. It is sweet, smooth, no seeds, that’s about the best I can do.
Looks so yummy wished I had some of that. You should make it and sell it. I’d buy it.
Me too!
LLLOVE prickly pear jelly… send me some! 🙂
Such a great idea! Send some out to Baltimore. I miss the southwest!!!
Similar to your family, my husband and I also moved across the country for school – but instead we moved from Colorado to Maryland for my doctorate. Best of luck to you and your husband!
Hope you’re enjoying Baltimore Sara. I’ve been here my whole life. Although we could use a little tax break huh 😉
Seriously! But we are quite enjoying the city. 🙂 It’s not quite Colorado, but we’ll take it! 😀
Perhaps we can do bulk shipping!! I love prickly pear tea, margaritas and jelly. I was out in Arizona this summer and tried to pick one OUCH!! Love it!!
That’s a nice gift! I too wonder how prickly pears taste like.
Great idea!
Can I be friend? Love me some home made jam. Lol
What a neat idea! Add a ribbon to that and your Christmas “shopping” is done!
Looks yummy!
That sounds so cool! I live in Arizona and never thought of that.
I Love it! I have an abundance of rabbits in my yard (not kidding 20 at any given time) but people would probably think I’m cruel/weird if I made rabbit jerky, fur scarves etc. I like your cactus idea better! p.s. I’m just kidding but I do joke if the world came to a stop we could eat.
lol since you didnt say just kidding right after you mentioned the rabbit thing i thought it was kind of weird that you would do things with the rabbits lol but then you said it at the end 🙂
LOL!!!
Rabbit fricassé is really yummy!! I’m not kidding! 🙂
It tastes great! We bought some while on vacation at Carlsbad Caverns but it cost way more than that!!
Yum, and so pretty. Makes me wish I was on your Christmas list.
Wow! I bought hay from a friend here in Nashville, TN,who mentioned the hay had Prickly Pear in it. I had no clue what it was but that my horse LOVES it! Bought a canning starter kit so I can learn. Thanks for the tip!!!
I wonder if it has any medicinal benefits. This is interesting. There is a lady who grounded bark and cured her Crohn’s disease.
i wish we had stuff around me in michigan to just can and eat!
By the looks of all these comments I think you should try to sell it…you could probably make a killing!
Completely agree. Maybe at a craft fair or flea market? We get free sticker labels all the time (or super cheap ones) so you could do your labeling cheap, too. I believe Colin posted a free deal just this morning.
Even if you don’t ‘sell’ them, the labels are a really nice idea. Put what it is, who it’s from and the year on the label. 🙂
Totally cool! I did green tomato jam one year and it was super fun!
What an awesome idea! Great gift.
That is really unique. What a great homemade gift!!!!
Dude, you rock. Sustainable and yummy. For anyone who wants to try this- they have teeny tiny little prickles all over them- wear gloves! The ones in the store don’t, but that’s not as fun. Just thought I would throw that warning out there- you really can’t tell by looking at them. Ouch. They are hard to get out of your hand…
Do they sell food on etsy? I love all the unique crafty ideas on there. You could sell it there and turn a nice profit.
Wonderful idea!! I live here in Tucson too. I work at UAMC.
Deborah, I live in AZ too and tried to get at a prickly pear fruit once, but the spikes were just too painful, do you have time to tell me how to get the juice out without hurting yourself?
Okay, here are my tips:
We gathered the fruit with salad tongs and put them in buckets. If you just wear gloves you will get poked through the gloves (depending on the thickness). While you are gathering and handling them, it’s important to wear the right “gear.” The second time around, I wore closed toed shoes, long pants and that significantly reduced the prick factor. When we went through the process of washing and cutting them, we had designated “stations” in our backyard for washing and cutting. That way almost all the of needles stayed outside because it’s the worst when days later you get poked by a minuscule and almost invisible needles by just walking around your kitchen. Right after we finished handling the fruit (the washing and cutting) we put them into the pot to boil, we changed clothes immediately and we threw our prickly clothes immediately into the washing machine. That de-prickled our clothes and kept any leftover needles from poking us throughout the rest of the process. After the fruit is boiled, all you have to do next that involves needles is deal with the ones that survived the boiling process. So you’ve got to strain the juice through a strainer with cheesecloth (we used a kitchen towel and then threw it out after the entire process) and you really don’t get pricked at all during the straining.
Hope that helped. Good luck, Jill. 🙂
Interesting, I thought I heard the prickers will come out if you freeze them, too. Nice to see a fellow Tucson-an on Collin’s blog 🙂 Don’t see that many comments coming from AZ 🙂
I am in oklahoma and saw some on the side of the road so i made my hubby stop so i could get them. i am going to can them tonight. I was an idiot and got the spines in my hand. Next time i am taking your advice. They are so cool.
I was so surprised to see that Hip2Save featured our prickly pear canning! How fun! 🙂 Thanks for the love guys. To answer some of your questions, prickly pear tastes sweet but with a unique flavor (hard to describe) and the combo flavors with other fruits in jams and jellies are really tasty. I love the strawberry prickly pear jam the best and my husband is crazy about the peach prickly pear jam. We ended up making about 60 jars and it was a fun husband/wife/toddler project. I’ve thought about selling some on etsy or something like that but didn’t know if there was interest but I guess there is. 🙂 If you are near some prickly pears and want to do some yourself I agree with Em, wear some gloves. We used salad tongs but no matter what you use, you probably will get pricks in you for days afterwards. We cleaned and cut them outside for our second batch and had significantly less needles to annoy us later. There are some great tutorial videos online that helped us out. You can make so many things will prickly pears: candy, jams, juice, syrup, soap, etc. There are some health benefits (google it) but they haven’t been studied too much. Hope that answered some of your questions. Thanks, Collin, Hip2save and you Hip2savers. 😀
My parents are from mexico and we eat prickly pears non stop, so do my kids, that includes my 13 month old. lol. I would love some !!!!
I’ve never heard of prickly pears, but I like how the words sound together. I think that’d be a cool blog name… The Prickly Pear. And I bet the jam/jelly is quite tasty.
I bought prickly pear cactus jelly in Arizona last year and paid about $7 a jar for it. Great gift idea at a great cost for you. To those who haven’t tried it…it is sweet and delicious!
Etsy has a few sellers that offer the prickly pear jelly. I went ahead and bought some because of this great post 🙂 Thanks for helping to introduce me to a new food 😉
Awesome idea! Glad to see there are others out there who can what grows in their yard. We were blessed by an abundance of grapes and pears this year so have been making grape jam, pear jelly, pear honey and just canned pears. Can’t beat free organic fruit! We are also planning to give some as Christmas gifts.
What a wonderful idea. And your friends will enjoy having a consumable product that is unique to your area versus more “stuff”. Way to go!!!
I’m guessing food sellers (such as those selling jams) may required licensed kitchens and be ready for health inspections. . .
And….did you know you can make your own pectin from the “leavings” of apples? We have apples here in IL soon to be picked and several weeks ago we went to our local park where we get to pick anything for FREE (paid for by our property taxes!) and picked under-ripe apples. They have the most pectin. You boil the skins and cores and seeds to extract the pectin. Google it to see details. If you do not have anywhere to pick, you can still use store bought apples and just use more of them since they are not green. You now have FREE pectin to make your jams and jellies with to save even more $ ! We ended up getting tons of free berries this year, so we did like you did w/ the cactus pears.
We moved to California from northern Arizona last fall, but before we left I made some prickly pear jam. I’m about out and very sad lol. It was one of the perks of desert life lol. I couldn’t find a recipe for jam, just jelly so I made my own with my canning knowledge 🙂 we also made syrup! It’s soo good! I explain the flavor of the jam as kind of melonish (watermelon) but more subtle.
Here is my Prickly Pear Jam Recipe: https://onemomentatatime-niece.blogspot.com/2012/09/prickly-pear-jelly.html
Enjoy!!!
adding strawberries sounds really yummy too.
oh yummy I wanna try it!!!!!!