on our visit to a prickly pear festival

In my opinion the prickly pear is an ugly cactus. It grows huge and takes over and new plants grow from even a leaf (?) falling on the ground. I can't see any use for it.

But the Sicilians??? They love it. They don't use the leaves (I know that's not the right term but I don't know what the real name is) like people in Mexico do, but they use the fruit in many ways.

And we got to see several of those ways.

This past weekend we went to the town of Militello not far from the base where they were having their annual prickly pear festival. This festival is a big deal and takes up most of the town for crafts, produce, food and just stuff in booths packed side by side, around corners, and up and down the hills. Vendors come from all around to sell about anything you could want, including prickly pears.

I think this was my favorite booth---for a bit. This man had it all in one. Ceramics, paintings, lots and lots of every kind of nuts grown in Sicily. Chestnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts....... And figs and dates and sun-dried tomatoes and on and on. I bought a couple of kinds of nuts and was looking around to see if there was something else I wanted to buy when I saw three cakes of prickly pear "candy" that had fallen on the ground. Just as I noticed them, the man also noticed and promptly picked them up off the street and put them back up on the display to sell......to eat. I was suddenly through shopping there and glad that what I bought was safe and clean inside its shell.

We were amazed to see the many ways to use prickly pears. We saw prickly pear "candy" (sort of like cookie shaped fruit roll-ups), prickly pear juice (mostrada), prickly pear sauces and marmalades.

At the end of one of the streets when we thought we might be lost, we came upon a group of booths with nothing for sale but products made from prickly pears. There were several booths with hot tubs full of prickly pear meat/pulp being constantly stirred. People would buy a little dish of the stuff sprinkled with chopped almonds. Of course we had to try it. Hm-m-m-m tastes just like......hot prickly pears.

Actually, the flavor of fresh prickly pears is very nice. There's no other fruit to compare its taste to but it's as sweet as a grape, none of the tartness of other fruits and very smooth. There are a great number of seeds in the prickly pear fruit. The people here just eat the whole thing. We spit out the seeds. It's a cultural thing.

There were some nice carts on display around the city but none like the ones we saw in Piedemonte. These carts were mostly the racing trotter kind. Here's one I thought was especially pretty.

There was a parade, of sorts, through town but the only way to tell it was a parade was that a band would walk down the street playing a tune, then soon another band. "So...how's that a sort of parade?" you might ask? Well, you know the old saying from the sixties, "What if there was a war and nobody came?" This was kind of like, "What if there was a parade and nobody paid attention." People walked up the street as if the band members were just other people at the festival. So the musicians had to play while dodging festival-goers. The only people on the sidewalks watching, I guess, were family members. I wish I had taken more photos of the bands because they were really quite good. One military band was very impressive in their camouflage uniforms and their military air. Another that I liked was this band of "gypsies" playing a "jaunty" tune.