• 8-10 cups of unripened grapes
• 3 cups of sugar
• Salt
• Rosé to taste
• 1 cup corn starch
• 3 cups heavy whipping cream
• Powdered sugar to taste (about a quarter cup)
• 1 Pie crust

Of all the pies we’ve made, this one has the most enthusiastic fan base. 

Pick the mustang grapes while they’re still green, while the seeds are still undeveloped and pasty-white. Somewhere around gumball-sized. The earlier you pick them, the less intrusive the seeds are, but the less creamy the flesh of the grapes. We’ve made this recipe four times, at four different stages of the grape development, and each time has produced a wildly different pie. 

Pick about two large HEB tupperwares worth of green grapes. Once you’ve completely de-stemmed them, you’ll have about one large HEB tupperware filled to the brim, about 8-10 cups. Put about half of the grapes through a food processor, chopped up fine. Add the remaining grapes to the grape-slurry in a thick-bottomed pot. Mix in 3 cups of sugar. A dash of salt. Splash the mixture with a generous helping of rosé wine. This gives the pie a certain tang, but also helps the sugar melt.

Cook on the stovetop for a while, stirring occasionally. Keep it at boiling temperature until the chopped grape pieces are soft, and the whole grapes are infused with sugar. Maybe 20 minutes or so.  Follow your gut on this one, and take frequent test tastes.

When the mixture gets to a point that you like, take it off the heat. Pour about a third into a heavy bowl to cool it down from boiling. Mix in a full cup of corn starch, stirring until it becomes a fairly smooth paste. Then slowly pour the corn-starchy third back into the main pot, mix in thoroughly (this process prevents corn starch lumps). Then put it back on the heat at low and stir constantly until the pie filling has thickened to the consistency of hot tar. 

Pour the filling into a pie crust. I prefer an old family recipe for the pie crusts called Hill Country Fare-brand graham cracker crust. You can go the extra mile and make a graham cracker crust from scratch, but this is one occasion where no one will notice the crust. Cover the filling with a piece of cling wrap to keep it from developing a skin, put in the fridge overnight or until it’s cooled. Once cooled, that cup of corn starch should be enough to keep any slice standing on end and not glooping once you remove it from the pie tin. 

Top with whipped cream. HEB-brand heavy whipping cream, very lightly sweetened with powdered sugar will give good results. It’s the densest, richest, most decadent whipped cream out there. 

The pie taste is reminiscent of rhubarb. Nice and sour like a pie should be.

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So with the help of gardening gloves and my cargo bicycle bucket, I picked about a gallon of the suckers. Unfortunately, my gardening gloves are only about 90% effective in warding the thorns of the mother cactus, or even the hair-like spines of the prickly pear itself. For weeks afterward I was plagued with the raspy feeling of raspy thorn heads buried just beneath my skin.

I managed to re-stick myself with more thorns as I prepared the prickly pear for consumption. If you soak the fruit in cold water and then briskly rub the skin, scraping off the patches of sharpness that spot the rind like measles, you can remove most of the near-invisible thorns.

But not all.

With a lemon juicer, I turned the pile of mostly de-fanged fruit into a bowl of viscous, purple juice, and another pile of pulp and seeds. A lot of seeds made it into the juice, but I don’t consider the prickly pear seeds a bad thing. They add texture and no doubt have significant nutritional value in their own right.

The juice retained a little of that slimey consistency that you might know from nopalito tacos. In a sorbet this is a good thing, it makes the finished product smoother and softer than what you would get from a simple fruit puree.

Getting the juice was the hard part. To that, I just added some sugar, lime juice, and rum to taste, and popped the slurry in the ice cream maker. The final result was not only eye-poppingly purple, but tasty as well.

I’ve been saving some seeds and cactus pads from particularly well-producing examples of the prickly pear fruit. Now all I need is some unkempt interstitial space to grow them in.

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The first thing you notice about the Irish Moss Soda is that there is no moss in it. At least non visible. There is however a creamy, thick, slurry of peanut flavoring. It tastes exactly like a third cup of Peter Pan PB with a half cup of milk added to it.

We know this isn’t actually what it is, because the total calories for a can of Irish Moss Soda, while astonishingly high at 280, is less than what you would get with that combination.

It’s more likely a quarter cup of peanut butter and about seven fluid ounces of skim.

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There I was, browsing through a convenience store off Cesar Chavez BLVD, when I came across this unusual flavor of paleta. A consultation with a handy smartphone translated the flavor, camote, as “sweet potato.”

At first, one might think that blue is an unusual color to represent sweet potato. Then you might think that potatoes of any sort are an unusual flavor for an icecream novelty. It brings to mind the curious habit of Eastern cultures to make beans a desert food. But the flavor was even more refreshing than what you might expect from a more conventional fruit popsicle. It was sweet, but it had a certain savory heartiness at its root, and there appeared to be actual pink flakes of sweet potato embedded in the paleta’s icy core.

It may not be as good as the rice flavor (the arroz paleta, which has actual pieces of rice and sometimes raisins too) but I would probably buy this flavor again if I came across it.

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