It's Snot What You Think!

It started with me wondering exactly what tapioca was made of...was it it's own plant? Why was it in balls? It just so happened that at the same time, I was reading the book The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. The characters were in Africa...I'm not going to do an overview...read it sometime. It's a good book. Anyhow, in the book the characters learned to eat a root called Cassava root (see above). It was processed into a flour, and cooked with water, kind of into a paste they called manioc. Well, imagine my surprise when I found out (via Wikipedia, of course!) that manioc and tapioca are the same thing. Tapioca pudding as we know it is just the version that the English came up with, a sweet version. The Africans would eat it flavored with whatever plant was in season.

It just so happened that I had a plain bag of tapioca flour in my cupboard (you never know what you'll find in my house, mainly because I never know what I'll find out and about--which I'll of course need for a future use of some sort, which was proven by the current example.) So, I mixed water and cassava (tapioca)flour together, and cooked it. Trying to imagine what these people ate. Here is what we ended up with:





Can I just say that I would much rather play with than eat this stuff? It's just like the slime from that old Nickelodeon kid's show I saw back in the early 90's. Only not green...but I could fix that.