Non-dairy Tapioca

Pudding anyone?

pudding

About a decade ago, we learned that David has a food sensitivity to milk and milk products. So all of those comfort foods involving milk? I stopped making them. I really like tapioca pudding but haven’t made it in…oh, 10 years. One day last week, I saw a bag of small pearl tapioca at the grocer and thought “humm…why not make it with almond or coconut milk?” So I did. Here’s the recipe. It turned out great.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup small pearl tapioca (do not use instant tapioca)
3 cups “fake” milk of choice (e.g. almond, rice, coconut, soy)
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1/2 cup of sugar
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla (or extract of choice)

Method

0 Pre-soak the tapioca pearls for at least 3 hours, but preferably overnight. If you don’t do this, it will take a long, long, long time for the pearls to become translucent as they should.

1 Combine tapioca, milk (I used Trader Joe’s unsweetened coconut milk), and salt in 1 1/2 quart pan on medium high heat. Stir until boiling. Simmer 5 minutes, uncovered at very low heat, adding sugar gradually.

2 Beat the eggs in a separate bowl. Mix in some of the hot tapioca very slowly to equalize the temperature of the two mixtures.

3 Return egg mixture to the pan with tapioca. Slowly bring mixture barely to a boil, stirring constantly. Reduce heat and stir several minutes at a low simmer, stirring constantly until you get a nice thick pudding consistency. Cool at least 15 minutes. Add vanilla. Serve either warm or chilled.

Makes 4-6 servings.

The Return Trip

We’ve had an interesting couple weeks since my last update to the blog. Arriving back in San Francisco Bay, we went straight to Brisbane Marina and started sorting through new projects and plans. I’ll update the blog about the trip over the next several days. Here are some pictures of the early portion of the trip while we were still in SoCal.

Swimming in Newport Beach harbor during warm sunny days anchored there was fun for David.

While anchored in Long Beach harbor behind White Island, I repaired the foresail leech which was losing its stitching to the combination of age and UV damage assaulted by leech flutter due to too much motor sailing in light winds.

Anytime I wanted to check or plot our progress, I had to negotiate with Beryl about access to the chart.

Sailing at sunset from Long Beach to Frys harbor anchorage on Santa Cruz Island.

The Santa Cruz north shore is full of rocky cliffs, sea caves, and kelp it seems.

Helpers

helper

Every boater needs a little help sometimes. In days gone by, tug boats could be counted upon to help bring ships into harbors. We arrived in Newport Beach Harbor last night and found this lovely tug boat moored near the anchorage at the end of Lido Island.

Along with the ship, often came another helper–the ship’s cat. The cats aboard could chase away rodents and improve crew morale. Yesterday, here on Mahdee, ship’s cat Beryl did a great job of supervising the navigation by sitting on the chart table all day long.

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