If you said "dessert?" then YES!
Our lovely neighbour Lou dropped over some tapioca (aka cassava) that her haus meri gave her. You may remember from one of last year's posts that Therese, our Tok Pisin teacher, made us some tapioca cakes, which I remember as being quite yummy! (Segue - OMG! That blog post! How excited was I?! And how itty bitty was my Biscuit?!)
Tapioca is a popular root vegetable eaten in PNG. Usually boiled or eaten cooked in coconut milk. I think the idea of turning it into a cake comes more from Malaysia and that sort of region, but it has been adopted in parts of PNG. We haven't eaten much "traditional food" since we've been here, apart from one muu muu.
Anyway, we decided to turn this large tree root looking thingy into dessert.
Full disclaimer: I have never before dealt with fresh tapioca.
What a crazy peeling experience... Very easy to peel, but has a thick white skin under the flimsy brown outer barky stuff...
After you wash it, then you have to grate the stuff....
This is about 500g worth of grated tapioca
(aka cheese according to Miss Nini!)
My tapioca fairy was quite happy heaping it into the bowl...
...until it wouldn't come off her hands!
She liked it again once she got to mix in the condensed milk, coconut milk,
brown sugar etc... suddenly it was "very yummy!"
Helping to scoop it out into the baking dish
I confess by this point I was sceptical. Nothing solid whatsoever had gone in besides the tapioca, and it was now a bit soupy... Nevertheless, we went ahead and threw it in the oven...
To my relief, it started looking great...
.... as did my lovely dishes fairy!
Mmmm... out of the oven
At this point, Dan came home from work. When he asked what it was and I told him, he said
"Oh, tapioca.... so, you've prepared it properly?"
"Um... what do you mean?"
"Well, if you don't cook it a certain way you can get tapioca poisoning"
"Oh."
Cue frantic googling.
Luckily, other people made this cake the same way I did, so apparently just cooking it is enough. Phew!
Ok, this pic won't make Donna Hay, but just to show what
it looked like when cut...
Biscuit approval!
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