Asakiyume mita

When I make casabe, I grate cassava and then squeeze out the fluid. The fluid is always milky white--cassava starch, aka, tapioca. The last time I did this, I let that starch dry... and there it was, actual tapioca, like I buy in the store! That I made out myself! Not very much (maybe a tablespoon's worth), but still!

I decided to use my homemade tapioca (generously supplemented with store-bought tapioca) to make boba, the bubbles in bubble tea. First step was to find some guidance on how to do this.

You have to bring a sugar-water solution (to which you can add cocoa powder or green tea if you want) to a boil, take it off the burner, and then add the tapioca starch. The heat causes the starch to somehow break apart on a molecular level (!) (Not an atomic level--that would be amazing, though: boiling-water-induced fission), and then you can sort of knead it as if it had gluten (which it doesn't). Then you flatten it out...

(you can click through on all of these to see them bigger if you want)


Then the (for me) hard part, cutting or breaking off small pieces and forming them into balls. If you have too much liquid, the balls won't stay balls--they flump back down into a flat circle--but if you have too much tapioca, they are powdery and break apart. Anyway, I made some balls, but they were about twice as big as the boba you get in real bubble tea:



The directions I was following were kind of confusing because they detoured into how you can store them at this point, but you can also just cook them right away. Cooking involves two separate boils. First, just in water. The time varies depending on the size of the boba. My main failure was that I didn't boil them for long enough--I was trying to have them finished by the time guests came. You want them to boil until they're almost entirely translucent, then turn off the water and let them sit until they get the rest of the way translucent. This means they're cooked all the way through. Mine never got that far, so they looked kind of adorably like frog eggs--or like ice cubes that are clear on the outside but opaque inside:





Then you put them to rest for a few minutes in cold water, and then you boil them again in sugar water syrup. The directions say to use brown sugar (which you can flavor if you want). I used panela, which is just solidified cane juice from crushed sugarcane and tastes delicious.



And then you put them in tea!

Mine were large, so you had to eat them with a spoon, and they had a center which, though not uncooked, was a different consistency from the outside--not ideal, but still tasty! I miiiight do it again sometime, but if I do, I'll try hard to make them smaller. But I might not do it again--it's easier to use tapioca starch for other delicious things, like pão de queijo (Brazilian cheese bread).

I have two new food treasures: One, from mnfaure (thank you my dear!), is Thé des songes, tea of dreams, which is fragrant and ethereal like dreams, but the look of it--black, with bursts of red and gold--is like the surface of a lava lake, so I think of it as lava tea.



And the other, red as blood, red as hot lava, is this bottle of palm oil!



And with this bottle of palm oil, I'm going to make *even more* of Flo Madubike's recipes. I'm going to start with this one, for fried beans.

mugwort tea

A cool drink for a hot day, an infusion of mugwort leaves. Mugwort grows so tall, pale and silvery on one side, olive green on the other; I just pick the tips, pretending I'm harvesting tea. Well, it will be a tea of sorts.

It has a scent like chrysanthemum and pine. Here's leftovers from the first batch:



It looks like rich pond scum doesn't it? But it's delicious and cooling.

kite patch

This is an amazingly innovative idea for a fighting mosquito-born diseases like malaria, dengue fever, encephalitis, and West Nile virus. It's a tiny, nontoxic patch that you put on your clothing. It disrupts the mosquitos' reception of your CO₂ signature, so they don't find and bite you. It lasts for 48 hours.

It's been proven effective and safe in preliminary tests, but, as with all pharmaceutical developments, it takes a whole lot of money and time to get FDA approval. Boy would I love to have some of those patches to take with me to East Timor! Both the teachers I'll be working with have suffered bouts of dengue fever, which is rife in Dili. But it's not available to the public yet, except in the test area of Uganda.

The indigogo kite patch campaign has reached its initial goal, but as with many of these campaigns, there are various stretch goals. Take a look and see what you think.