Nopales [Cactus] Salsa Recipe

I am having a lot of fun with cactus, or as they call it here, nopal. If you saw my post last week, I adventured into making nopales tortillas which are great for rice and beans with this salsa! Check out the recipe here. Now, for the salsa, I was inspired by this recipe but I obviously modified it. You can do what you want to make the recipe taste the way you'd enjoy it more. I was just using what ingredients I had and it still came out delicious! I began by washing off and cutting my vegetables and fruit. Once prepped, they were placed on a pan, except for the fresh cilantro and lime.

I then roasted the red pepper, tomatoes, nopales, onion, garlic cloves, and jalapeno. My house loves spicy food, but I only had one semi-spicy pepper. If you like more spice you can certainly add some serrano pepper or your favorites.

Once nice and roasted after rotating or flipping until I felt they were good, I blended the cilantro and the roasted ingredients in a food processor, added the lime juice and some salt to taste. It came out really good. I made it again and added some corn and it was amazing! Here are the ingredients that I used:

• 2 nopales [cactus paddles, de-pricked]
• 2 tomatoes
• Jalapeno
• 1/4 onion
• 2 garlic cloves
• 1/2-3/4 bunch of fresh cilantro
• 1/2 lime squeezed
• 1 can or 1 cob of corn [roasted if desired]
• 1/2 red bell pepper [optional]
• Salt to taste

As a note, it's best to keep the cactus in as much of one piece as possible while roasting because it will ooze out its gooey center and dry out if it is in sliced pieces. You can obviously cut it into pieces to help with blending in your food processor once cooked. The salsa itself is a bit gooey as well, but it goes great on tacos, with chips, or as a salad dressing. This was just a fun experiment and I'm sure many others can jazz this recipe up to their own taste. As I've stated earlier in this post, I was using the ingredients I had to make something delicious. The corn and spicier peppers such as serrano peppers would make it really good. I hope you have enjoyed this post, let me know if you made some type of salsa with nopales before and share if you'd like in the comments below!

Note: All images not cited are my own or created by me.

Be well!

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