So many ideas, so little time:
nine hours later it was prickly pear syrup, not jelly

For years I have had the desire to make preserves with the fruit of prickly pear, and somehow I talked my friends into the project, which they approached with zeal and vim, something that would wane decidedly by the end of a spiny, prickly, purple adventure in a small kitchen on a nearby ranch.
The easiest part of the task was the pre-jelly making ranch breakfast before getting down to the serious work. Breakfast went into overtime over coffee, but it was so pleasant on this particular Saturday to continue the conversations that have made us friends. Picking the tunas was a cake walk -- the ripe ones break easily from the prickly pads with a pair of tongs, a good thing because two hours past high noon is an ill-advised time of the day to pick fruit in the desert.
I mused over who thought how much was enough when the pear picking was going on, a musing that gave me my first indication of how opinionated we each were, how different, and what bearing those two observations might have as four strong-willed women undertook to cook and put up jelly. I don't know which contrasting indicator hit me first. Was it that two of my friends were wearing open-toed shoes into the monte? Or was it in the moment that I heard Adrienne's harvest of tunas hit the walls of an ice chest to fill it, which gave me the idea we might be overshooting the scope of the project. But on the scale that pear fills the landscape of our ranch, we weren't making a dent in available supplies. Our compañera Dr. Jeffrey, an anthropologist with strong environmental convictions, worried that perhaps we were depriving birds and other wildlife of valuable food. Nah!
I had used only tongs, long ones, and still hadn't made contact with thorns of any kind. Some of my compañeras had by now come up against the tiny thorns.
We had been organized to a point. Diana had picked up the canning jars and pectin and had uniformly cut lemon peels to mix into the jelly. I'd pulled recipes off the Internet, more than I'd needed, something that would become a problem as it became apparent that we of so many diverse points of view were offered too many choices. Each recipe had a suggestion for how to get the clusters of minute thorns off the pear fruit. Though Dr. Jeffrey said several times that burning them over the flame of a candle worked best, the majority acted to boil the pear and then peel off the outer skin that held the thorns to the pear.
From the kitchen I took in the purple scenario unfolding before me in the next room. One candle, scented; 20 kilos of boiled cactus fruit; another 20 kilos with thorns intact; a building chorus of "damned espinas."
I did what I knew I had to do, which was to continue to have no contact with the fruit and to build a fire in the hearth to roast the thorns off the tunas. Impaling them two at a time on several of the long steel forks we keep near the hearth, the process worked rather well, and I was told the heat removal system was a good one.
We'd clearly over-estimated the size of our project, not only on how many pear fruit we had gathered, but also on how many we had roasted and parboiled. This, coupled with protracted discussions over which recipe would work best, is when I began to understand today's exercise was a learning experience, something that would become more clear as the brilliantly colored mix of sweet, delicious cooked fruit, sugar, and pectin wouldn't stiffen or stand, something that clarified for us that removing the hard, sequin-sized seeds was a very important step in the process.
We'd added too much water when we added the lemon peel, Diana speculated as she eyed the empty pectin boxes. Miles away from more pectin, we had dispatched Adrienne to Zapata, including instructions to bring supper, too, for it was now nearly 7 p.m., and the kitchen, now awash in colors for Lent, was in no shape to cook a meal. On the off-chance that more sugar might make it thicker, two of us ran into San Ygnacio to buy sugar at Pepe's.
Long story short: all the pectin in Zapata, all the sugar in San Ygnacio would not make our purple concoction the consistency of jelly or jam.
"Let's fill 'em," I said as I sterilized one after another of the jars and brass-ringed screw tops. The sloshing had only just begun. Purple and magenta spatters covered the stovetop, the tiled countertop, and the clothing, faces, and arms of some of us. The color of the bubbling foam of the mix in the cauldron was lovely, and just about the requisite 212°, information that none of the Internet recipes provided but that had come to us via the canning instructions inside the box of jars.
Diana had done a remarkable job of keeping the dishes clean and the work space organized. Whatever pot or pan had just been enlisted on the stovetop was washed immediately after use. Adrienne was intrepid, calling up all her refined culinary skills in the effort to make our product have the delicious and artful outcomes she has in her catering business.
Dr. Jeffrey provided a narrative of successes she'd had making preserves other times. Me, I was taking notes.
A little out of sequence, one of us began to read the Internet recipes carefully. "It says if we had left the peel on, the peel would have provided natural pectin." If our friend hadn't already been so artfully covered with purple, we'd probably have whacked her a time or two with our purple wooden spoons and given her yet another dose of anti-oxidants.
Eight hours into this canning adventure, patience was wafting up the chimney with the lazy smoke of the spent hearth fire. There were piles, mounds of surplus pear at the hearth, in a blue plastic dishpan on the floor, in the ice chest. The chickens had already gotten a load of processed fruit and would likely enjoy yet another before sunset.
"We can call it syrup. It's very pretty," one of us offered.
"Syrup comes in bottles," another said, a comment so illuminating, utterance of which one would not register surprise at hearing, coming from so educated a milieu of fine minds, no less than 25 years of higher education among us.
"We had too many recipes, that was the problem," one of us said in the moment that we spooned the color purple onto our ice cream.
This morning, alarmed that my little four-cup coffee maker was glued to the countertop with prickly pear juice, I noted, too, that some of the grout of the counter tiles had changed to the color of majesty. I mused at my friends, who last night, unfazed and in a state of deep magenta exhaustion, suggested that sooner than later we should undertake jelly making again and do it right.
Unbelievably, as I recounted yesterday's work to LareDOS editor Tom Moore, he shared with me the news that Tony Ramirez' Medicine Man column in this very issue of LareDOS has a recipe for making prickly pear jelly.