A fishy day

You may have noticed that I have been fiddling around with tapioca recipes lately. I didn’t remember that I loved tapioca until Rebecca started making some Asian desserts, including green corn tapioca. Does that sound odd or does it sound yummy? Maybe both, but it is definitely yummy. Then she made some strawberry tapioca thing that I thought was on of the best things I ever ate. It used minute tapioca, but I wanted the genuine fisheye effect in my strawberry dessert. As I said in an earlier post, the directions on my tapioca packet are in Chinese, and hence, not helpful. The first time I used it, I looked up cooking directions on the web, and got vastly conflicting information. So my initial attempt was a little crunchy. I looked again today, and found a recipe for traditional milky vanilla tapioca pudding on 101 Cookbooks, a reliable blog with recipes that always work and are always tasty. I used the wet and dry amounts and the cooktimes from her recipe – which sounds très delicious, and which I plan to make soon.
My aunt shocked me this evening by telling me that she had never heard of fisheye pudding. Obviously she never went to boarding school, and she lived at home when she went to college. That explains it – no dorm food. When I lived in the dorm, I didn’t let it be well known because of the possible inherent disgrace, but l loved the fisheye pudding.
Here is a closer-up picture of the delightful fisheyes.

Strawberry Tapioca

½ cup pearl tapioca
2 ½ cups of water
½ cup of sugar
About 1/3 cup of orange juice concentrate
Zest from one orange (I would have used a lemon but I didn’t have one)
4 cups of strawberries diced

Soak the tapioca in room temperature water for about an hour. Bring the water, tapioca, sugar, and orange zest to a boil, and cook it, stirring occasionally for about 20 minutes until the tapioca becomes translucent and soft, and the water thickened. Stir in the orange juice concentrate until the mixture returns to a boil. Stir in the strawberries and give it a few stirs until the mooshy part turns pink. Divide it into bowls and chill it until you are ready to serve it.