Cited above is a modest web page giving five nopales recipes. Which I bring up because the Mexican market over on College Avenue sells 1-pound bags of nopales for $2.75 each. At our house, we eat nopales sautéed with zucchini, red bell pepper and cilantro and tossed with vinegar and oil. This page, however, presents do-able recipes I've never seen before. It makes me wonder what the Aztecs would have thought.

The Aztecs were eating nopales before Columbus arrived. They esteemed the prickly pear cactus (which yields nopales) so highly that, following their conquest by Cortés, they wrote to the King of Spain about the cactus. See this pdf reprint from the American Journal of Botany for more information about that. You can also check out folio 47r of the Codex Mendoza – which is a mid-16th century Aztec codex housed at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University since 1659 – where the Aztec illustrator depicted the prickly pear cactus in the upper left-hand corner of the page. For different reasons (or maybe not), I'm sharing this with you.