The tomato and bell pepper came from the garden.

The nopales were an experiment from foraged cactus. Definitely going to try a different recipe for that because the one I used left a lot of gel okra like gel making plating a little harder than it should be. Once I find the right recipe cactus will be a practically free food source

Instead of buying chicken thighs I bought a whole roaster and butchered it myself. This dramatically cuts the cost of chicken as long as you are going to use the whole thing. In this case I just used the thighs but I have uses for the rest including all the “waste” parts going to make a stock at some point.

Cost per person: $3.42 About a dollar of that was just cheese

The nopales were an experiment from foraged cactus.

Excellent. I’ve been having many a nopales salad from the local place, as they’ve been surprisingly tasty. What really ‘tied the room together’ was some kind of mustard-based dressing, which I wasn’t expecting at all…

Mustard base dressing with nopales, sounds pretty awesome.

I don’t know what it is about mustard-based sauces. It seems like every couple years I wind up having some version of such with either a dish or recipe I tried, remark to myself about what a little stroke of culinary genius that was, and then… promptly forget about the whole thing, mentally retreating to a sort of ‘mustard on fries’ position.

Stoopid brain.

I’m lucky to live in the part of the Carolinas that understands there are three types of barbecue sauce that can go on pulled pork and that mustard based sauce is one of them.

Ah!

From the cactus ingredient and the comment about Roberto’s in SoCal, I guessed that you lived on the Left Coast. So, cactus in the Carolinas, eh? Well, I never…

I grows pretty well here in Lesser Carolina. We find wild patches on hikes and some have it as a yard plant.

No one in Southern California calls it SoCal.

Huh! “Lesser Carolina” is not a term I’ve heard before, but from what I’m reading, it’s totally not the state I was thinking of. More like the home state of a former peanut farmer…

No one in Southern California calls it SoCal.

Aw. It has a nice ring to it, but I’ll abide.

I moved from North to South so I had a pretty good justification for coming up with a better name.

SoCal is like SanFran. It’s a shibboleth that tags one as an outsider.

Sorry to hear that.

But at least you have nopales.

And livermush. I was delighted to find when I moved to the Carolinas that there was a whole new breakfast meat in my life.

Oh rabbits, that sounds… remarkably like what we refer to as “scrapple,” roundabout the town where I grew up in, a bit yonder, North.

Liver mush is made with just the liver and as much tastier.