Cooking

Delicious!
This is a kind of cactus called Nopal. It's eaten in many different ways - raw in a salad with tomato, chili and onion. (Add salt and corriander to taste.) This is probably the easiest way to do it. It can be grilled and cheese melted on the top of some chili (chili largo is rather tasty with Edam cheese.) It also tastes great fried and then eaten in quesadillas.
As well as the actual cactus you can eat the fruit, which are called tuna in Spanish (much to my initial confusion.) You have to be rather careful peeling them because of the spikey bits but the fruit itself is well worth the effort. It's delicious. Mexicans often eat the fruit with salt and lemon, quite often sprinkling chili powder on them. Tunas also make great flavoured water - just liquidise some with water, adding sugar to taste.

Huitlacoche
The first person who ever tried the black fungus growing on the corn must have been starving! But it tasts so delicious. What you can see here is a blue corn tortilla quesadilla made from Oaxaca cheese and huitlachoche (pronounced weet-la-co-che or something like that.) This is something I really enjoy eating and it's a common food in autumn here. You can also get delicious huitlacoche soup.