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).

osprey_archer has been visiting, and together we embarked on an epic task: baking croissants from scratch. This truly is an epic task as you need to roll out the dough multiple times, and in between, it should rest in the fridge for eight hours (you can shorten this, but the longer the better, say the experts. Or at least one expert. This is the video we used for instruction.)

We documented the last rolling out, cutting into triangles, forming into the proper croissant shape, final rising, and emergence from the oven. All but the last two photos are below the cut.

( Osprey Archer demonstrates the fine art of croissant making )

The first couple of batches that we baked, we forgot to brush with diluted egg, but we remembered for the last batch, and Oh My Goodness, how beautiful that last batch looked. If you decide to bake croissants, don't skip the egg wash!

Here they are, fresh from the oven:



And here's the inside of one. Déliceu!



Making croissants was one of two New Year's resolutions I had this year, so I'm very grateful that osprey_archer helped me fulfill it! I doubt I would have done it without her visit, and I certainly would have gone astray in following the directions correctly.

I haven't made New Year's resolutions in quite a few years--like, since even before the pandemic--but this year I have a couple! I am sharing them. Accountability!

One is to try making croissants. It seems impossibly hard. But so rewarding!

The other is to make a more consistent and frequent effort with my writing. I have the Tales of the Polity novel that I'm working on, but for the past year or so, I've only been sitting down to work on it once a week, with rare exceptions. And/But also, I think I need to write some other, shorter, different things, because I have an urge to share. I have stories to tell, but if I can't share them, then ... well it's frustrating! I'm greedy--I can't wait however many years it'll be until I finish the novel; I have to share some other things. So I'm going to make writing a daily thing and see if that helps.

Eh bien, mes amis, and now I'm going to decorate some gingerbread for my next-door neighbors. The bougie neighbors are getting cats (they have two cats), bees (the mom loves bees), flowers, butterflies, and a guy on a snowmobile (I have no clue what the dad likes, but he does have a tow thing that Wakanomori is pretty sure contains a snowmobile, so I made a gingerbread guy on a snowmobile for the dad).

For the fun-music-playing, knife-throwing-training, rock painting family on the other side, I made mainly Gen-one Pokemon figures (Pikachu, Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Gengar, two each: one for the son and one for the daughter) because I know the son at least loves Pokemon. Also two squirrels and some snowflakes. The daughter likes wearing pretty dresses ("the garment should be flowing when the knives you're throwing"), so I did a gingerbread girl in a flowing dress, and the boy I just did as a gingerbread boy in an embrace-the-world stance.

ETA: I am ruining these by trying to frost them -_-

A guy I follow on Twitter is doing a couple of polls about greens (the things you eat, not the members of the political party... I mean if you're a cannibal that distinction might not be valid but I suspect for most of you it is, plus--no capitalization!)

Here is a link.

For those of you as click-averse as I am, there are two groups of greens:

First group:

chard
collards
kale
spinach

Second group:

beet greens
cress
mustard greens
turnip greens

You have to choose your favorite for cooking in each group. (You can go vote if you want--it will add a new dimension to his polling base.)

So .... do you all have favorites? Opinions? Beloved recipes? I cook spinach, kale, and beet greens; I have cooked mustard greens now and then, and sometimes chard. I did not know you could *eat* turnip greens--it's an exciting new piece of information.

Angel
My mother had very elaborate Christmas cookies that she made with us kids: we made the recipe for sand tarts (a flat, roll-out cookie suitable for cookie cutters) from The Joy of Cooking, then iced the with almond-flavored white icing, then painted on them with very fine paint brushes and food coloring. (Some examples.) I have my own cookie cutters, but earlier this year my dad wanted to clear out the old ones we had as kids. I got the angel.



The great thing about cookies made with this cookie cutter is that because the connecting bits (neck, joint of the wings) and arms are so thin, often they get moved this way or that when you're moving the cookie dough from the counter to the cooking sheet. So the head will tip back (gazing heavenward) or forward (deep in prayer) or the wings will flex outward or move toward the body. If the dough gets too warm, then the angel can get elongated in the transfer to the cooking sheet, or shortened. It makes for a various collection. I'll try to post some.

Center versus Periphery
It's fun to think about which categories comprise the Bad Guys in tales. For example, in dystopian fiction, usually the State is Bad and the Insurgents are Good, though sometimes (as in The Hunger Games) all groups end up being Bad (which brings up a more fundamental Good versus Bad dynamic in Western fiction: that the Individual is Good and the State/Society is Bad--unless we're talking the horror genre or certain sorts of cop or detective fiction, in which case the State/Society is Good and the Individual may represent Eldritch or Some Other Sort of Bad. (Yes, I'm enjoying capitalizing things today.)

So I was thinking about the Center and the Periphery, specifically about the national government versus local governments, and I was thinking about cop shows. I was thinking about how they quite tidily feature both sides in both roles. In ones favoring the Center, the heroes are from the FBI or other national agency, and they're brought in to deal with a difficult case that the corrupt, ignorant, and inept locals don't have the wherewithal to deal with. In ones favoring the Periphery, the local force must manage to solve the case despite the interference of the arrogant, high-handed feds, who often have an endgame that's at odds with the local need for justice or solution of the case.

Helpful Pamphlet
Saw this on a rock. Someone left it out as a helpful message, maybe? But then days later I saw it had fallen off the rock and was rain soaked. Not all messages reach an audience that can receive them.



Okay, to work I go. I have a big job I need to finish by the end of the day tomorrow.

Yesterday at the blog The Blue and Green House, they talked about the year without a summer--1816, the year following the massive eruption of Mt. Tambora. In my neck of the woods, snow fell as late as June and as early as August--across Europe there were famine conditions from failed crops. Wikipedia says that there was so much aerosolized material in the atmosphere that sunspots were visible to the naked eye.

Later in the day, out of the blue, wakanomori started telling me about one of the most powerful eruptions in recorded history, which he'd seen tweeted about. "Oh, maybe it was the eruption of Mt. Tambora," I said--fresh from my reading. He looked at me strangely and said, "Yeah, I think that's the one."

We both mused on why, in two separate venues, two separate people should have happened to talk about Mt. Tambora.

... And discovered that yesterday was the bicentennial of the eruption. Well then!

Meanwhile, on Twitter, people were tweeting humorous thoughts for new Hugo Award categories, and Nisi Shawl suggested, among other things, an award for Most Dramatic Pie.

So I decided to make a volcano pie--surely dramatic--to commemorate the bicentennial of Mt. Tambora's eruption. Behold the Pie:

Lots of red-lava chunks

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.

One of my earliest memories of Internet goodness is of searching for a recipe for wild mushrooms--this would have been sometime between 1998 and 2005--and finding one offered by a guy who identified his location as Turkish Kurdistan. We had a brief back and forth, and I thought, Now this place is personal to me. I know someone there. I know he used to pick wild thyme with his grandmother.

Fast forward to last summer. One of my best memories from Timor-Leste was of being served deep-fried plantain chips, homemade, and of sharing the leftovers with friends. I wanted to make those myself, to feel close (because eating food brings us close) to Timor-Leste. And the best recipe I found? Was a Nigerian one.



So easy to follow, so clear, so pleasant! (And the recipe was a success)

Not only did this bring me close to Timor-Leste, it made me feel close to Nigeria. I had one previous experience with Nigerian food: akara--wonderful, croquette-like deep-fried items, made with ground black-eyed peas, with onions and hot peppers to flavor it. I bought some at a local market, loved it, wanted to know how to make it, and had found recipes online, but was stymied by one key detail--getting the skins off the black-eyed peas.

Oh My God, the time that took. I'd soak the black-eyed peas, and as they expanded, the skins would begin to come loose. Then I'd rub them together in the soaking water to get more loose, and then I'd strain off the skins (which would float), while trying to keep the peas themselves from pouring out. It was such a slow process! I mean, kind of relaxing, too, if you have nothing else to do, but. . .

Well, Flo, the woman behind All Nigerian Recipes, has the answer for that, too:

( two videos about getting the skins off beans )

So by this time I'm really loving this Youtube channel, loving the recipes, loving the fact that Flo responds to comments--and loving her personal videos, too. Like this one:



Pretty cool, right? Not only does Flo put up fabulous cooking videos, she also has an *intense* day job!

And because the Internet lets us make friends with people all over the world--just write hello, just hit send--I thought . . . maybe she would let me interview her.

Then I checked and saw that she has close to 30,000 subscribers. Her top video has more than half a million views, and her top ten videos all have over 100,000 views. I'm not the only one who loves her. So then I felt more hesitant about getting in touch. . . . But I overcame that and wrote to her, and she said yes!

So come back on Monday, everyone, when Flo will answer my questions about cooking, YouTube, and self-publishing a cookbook.

Meantime, enjoy her channel and maybe have a Nigerian meal tonight.

Video List Here!

My best friend in the night sky right now is Jupiter, so golden there below the Pleiades.

And here's a silver track. Don't fall off! The ground is poisonous! At least in Railsea.



Railsea, where the train captains lose limbs to the giant burrowing animals, and develop philosophies:

"You know how careful are philosophies," Naphi said. "How meanings are evasive. They hate to be parsed. Here again came the cunning of unreason. I was creaking lost, knowing that the ivory-coloured beast had evaded my harpoon & continued his opaque diggery, resisting close reading & a solution to his mystery. I bellowed, & swore that one day I would submit him to a sharp & bladey interpretation . . . I've had my blood & bone ingested by that burrowing signifier," she said, waving her intricately splendid arm. "A taunt, daring me to ingest him back."
China Miéville, Railsea (New York: Del Rey Books, 2012), 104-5.

Hahaha, litcrit speak.

And now I'm going to get back to making desperance's marmalade. I had to go buy some sugar (and so I saw Jupiter, and so I got my binoculars, but I couldn't see its moons, though the Internet promised I might--but then I turned the binoculars on the Plieades and saw an explosion of stars hidden from my unaided eye).