While you were cursing your mesquite pods for covering your porch and your car, Brad Lancaster was getting ready to make pancakes.
Lancaster belongs to a Tucson-based group called the Desert Harvesters, which shuttles its mill across Southern Arizona making a nutritious flour from the pesky pods.
Once a year, the group throws a pancake breakfast. Pod collectors bring their mesquite pods, and the group will grind them up into a tasty flour — up to 10 gallons of pods can be made into 2 gallons of fine flour in about 10 minutes.
Then the Harvesters make mesquite-flour pancakes to be topped with saguaro and prickly-pear syrups.
Lancaster says the event, in addition to bringing people together over a plate of flavorful flapjacks, is an attempt to raise awareness for native eating and sustainable living. The average American meal travels several hundred miles from the farm to the plate, Lancaster says.
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"We're saying, 'You can get a great meal that's grown in your own backyard,' " he says.
And, indeed, Lancaster grows mesquite for flour, nopal cactus, pomegranates, peaches, figs and many other types of edible fruits and vegetables in his own backyard in the Dunbar-Spring Neighborhood.
Those who have had food made from mesquite flour say it has a denser texture, much more like whole wheat flour than white, processed flour, and a natural sweetness that comes from the fructose in the pods, and is reminiscent of cinnamon graham crackers.
Lancaster says when he uses it to make cookies and brownies, he leaves out the sugar.
Dr. Kris Olson-Garewal, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and a consultant to the diabetes program for the Pascua Yaqui tribe, says people with diabetes would benefit from using mesquite flour not only because of its natural sweetness, but also because it's a complex carbohydrate. Complex carbohydrates, unlike the simple starches in plain, white flour, are broken down more slowly by the body. Substituting some mesquite flour for white flour will provide a more even energy stream, even for someone without diabetes.
"You're not going to get that spike-and-fall," Olson-Garewal says. Mesquite flour stabilizes blood sugar and has a long digestion time, which means it staves off hunger, according to the Pascua Yaqui Tribe Health Department.
The reservations, Olson- Garewal says, are promoting the use of mesquite in the push to return to native eating.
"They say years ago, kids used to just suck on the pods when they didn't have candy," the doctor says.
If you'd like to collect pods for next year's breakfast, Lancaster recommends picking them right off the tree. For directions on how and when to harvest, go online to www.desertharvesters.org.
Pods must be free of dirt, debris and mold or they can clog the mill. He also tells people to taste the pods before harvesting because each tree produces a different flavor.
Mesquite flour is for sale at www.nativeseeds.org for $7 for 8 ounces.
What: Desert Harvesters Mesquite Milling Fiesta and Mesquite Pancake Breakfast.
Where: Dunbar-Spring Organic Community Garden, on the corner of West University Boulevard and North 11th Avenue.
When: 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. (or until the pancakes run out) Nov. 11.
Cost: $3 for milling up to 10 gallons of pods; $3 for breakfast.