Peel back the thick fleshy skin with the use of the fork and knife that’s wrapped around the prickly pear.

com property partners should not post on behalf of guests or offer incentives in exchange for reviews. Yeah I’d say the sweetness is the only thing that remotely links them, but it’s such a different sweet anyway…and I like my figs *and* fichi d’India chilled.Farmers claim it works better than Compeed, provided of course they do not puncture their thumbs on the long prickly spikes. They own the club Arlecchino, in Vedano Olona, where many cabaret artists from Milan and Varese became famous.

Somewhere in the northeast quarter of Sicily, as we rounded a bend by a grand but incidental rail bridge, we spotted a roadside fruit and vegetable stall. i once watched a group of friends in Italy do ’rounds’ as the woman selling them out the trunk of her car peeled them. Some like to feel the crunch of the seeds between their teeth, while others eat them as they do pomegranates, swallowing seeds along with the gelatinous flesh (think, "fiber"). I was also informed that in Sardegna it is turned into a jam and used as a filling for their renowned tilicas biscuits.Add some vanilla, sugar, some Marsala, grated orange peel, ground cloves and ground cinnamon (all to your taste). In southern Italy they make a cream liqueur with this fichi d’india fruit, thanks for helping me learn that its name in english is prickly pear. My sister-in-law told me that most of the non-Italians (and even some Italians who didn’t grow up in Sicily like her family) either don’t eat fichi d’india at all because it’s too intimidating, or they eat it wrong. The love of this versatile fruit has seen the fico d’india turned into ice cream, sorbet and even liquor. My little moment of mouth-wiping on the way back to the car served to spread the pain further abroad.

We had (and I’m jealous of my childhood self here) an avocado tree, some banana trees, a mulberry tree, a loquat tree, lemon trees in abundance, apricot trees, vines and , you guessed it, prickly pears. The flat, irregular, leaves of the fica d’india are oval-shaped, a little bit bigger than a table tennis racquet.

Instead, you take the bite and press it to the roof of your mouth to release the juices and the pulp. Unless someone had peeled them and set them in front of me, I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to try them either.

Prickly pears, sometimes referred to as cactus fruit, are a popular fruit found all over southern Italy, especially on the island of Sicily. The plant, also known in English as Indian fig opuntia, barbary fig, cactus pear, spineless cactus, or mostly prickly pear, is typical of arid and semiarid parts of the world. From what I understand you cannot predict the colour- some may be red,orange or yellow but come from the same plant.Ever since I published these photos, I know our good friend Gil has been wondering about whether the prickly pears (fichi d’India) are ripe, and well, I’m happy to announce, the time has arrived (see left)! I’m going to take an outrageous guess that the undecipherable mouthful of Italian that the supposedly feisty vendor blurted out was something like this: “Don’t touch that fruit, never touch the fruit, it’s covered in fine prickles, and they won’t kill you, but they will hurt you. On this site bloggers can post information about any herb, plant, fruit, vegetable or flower – I submitted my information about prickly pears to the host for the week: The Cabinet of Prof Kitty . I and my mother love this fruit, and we’d love to try growing the yellow ones (like my mom grew up around in Snfratello) but we can’t find a place that will sell this type of plant. Some make a kind of marmalade from this exotic fruit, which is often crushed, deseeded and strained then left to dry out in the sun to become a chewy type of candy.