This is a sign that we saw as we were on our drive. Gotta love AZ.
Prickly pears are ripe right now so, we decided to go on a afternoon drive to Sonoita & pick some.
Even Marlee "helped" us- I like the picture above because it looks as if Marlee is about to fall into the cactus.
Porter has his game face on
Clayton with a prickly pear he got
The boys were such a big help & it didn't take long until the bucket was full.
Marlee on the other hand was a good observer.
Marlee loves sitting in the driver seat & looking out the window.
And the boys love sitting in the bed of the truck.
Our dog Sage had a good time running around.
Marlee loves being outdoors & trying to keep up with her brothers.
The boys found these really cool walking stick bugs.
Checking out the bugs
The boys like taking along their bug bucket because they usually find cool creatures.
Marlee loves to "drive".
It was such a beautiful day, the weather was perfect & it was so green. It is crazy to think that Sonoita isn't very far from Tucson but looks so different.
The boys looked cute in their matching Utah State shirts-Go Aggies!
We ate at this cool restraunt in Sonoita where they have live music; there was a violin & guitar player & they sang. Marlee loved it & would dance. It was the best she has ever behaved at a restraunt before. The boys liked the music too. The downside is that Laun & I were only impressed with their french fries & the rest of the food was just so-so.
Before we headed home we stopped by coldstone for some dessert.
When we got home we had all these beauties to deal with, which means Laun & I had to stay up late-Laun does most the work though.
Laun cut them up & put them in a big pot with water on the stove & mashed them to get the juice out.
Then we use a cheese cloth to strain out the seeds & needles from the juice.
This is some of the juice we got from the prickly pears.We put the juice in food saver bags & freeze them for later. Then when we want to make prickly pear jelly or syrup, we have the juice already to go.
My favorite is the prickly pear syrup. We try to have enough juice to last us through the year so we can always make that syrup.
8 comments:
Your family does the coolest stuff.
I agree with Jules! I am jealous!
What a fun family outing. Dont you think Caspers would have been a little better then Cold Stone though?
Just doing a little catch up on your blog. Sorry to hear you have had a rough time recently, I hope you are feeling better!
We went to the Tucson zoo Monday and saw a tortoise eating a prickly pear, I have wondered how to make jelly out of it! and syrup sounds delicious, have you ever tried boysenberry syrup? I imagine it tasting like that!
That is a super cool family outing!
That is my favorite restaurant! We used to make prickly pear jam when I was little - so much fun!
We were just talking about doing this. My mom used to take us out every year to pick and prepare. I miss it.
There is a sign just like that about 500ft from our house. bad? (it's true) last night border patrol was out at 2am searching for people. ugh. We are so thankful for our protective dogs!
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