As I was thinking about our upcoming Thanksgiving meal, I thought about this 4-ingredient recipe that our family often makes and decided to try it. It’s usually pretty simple, except for knowing when it has become “thick and clear.” But here it turned out to be a bit more complicated…
First of all, none of the four ingredients are available here, so I had to get creative. I had brought some orange jello, but I had to figure out the rest locally. I bought some whipping cream and some tapioca crystals at the store, and was now ready to try it out.
I first went to visit my friend who sells fruit, to see if she had any fresh local mandarin oranges for sale today. She said that she had just gotten some at the market and would bring me some soon.
Then I went home and added some water to my water filter. The water had been cut for over 24 hours at this point so my water filter was empty, but I had some extra water that I could add (thanks to a friend who had brought me some water earlier!). This way it would filter by the time I needed it.
Now I set to work on the tapioca. I had tried to figure out what the local equivalent was of 2 boxes of Americana tapioca pudding, and, the best I could figure from what I read online, I could pound my tapioca crystals with my mortar and pestle until I had 1 1/2 cups or so of finer tapioca, and that should do it. So I started pounding.
Once I had that ready, the water was filtered and I heated it up. I then added the orange jello and the tapioca, and it was instantly thick and clear. I realized then that it was way too much tapioca. I kept adding more water (maybe another 1 1/2 to 2 cups?) until the pot was completely full, and it was still a lot thicker than normal. Now how to know how long to let it cook since it already seemed thick and clear?
After a while I tried a little bit to see how it tasted, and I realized that the largest of the tapioca pieces (that were about as wide across as a grain of rice) were crunchy – I guess the answer is to let it cook until those are cooked and not so crunchy!
As I was waiting for that, I got to work on the cool whip, whipping the whipping cream until it had the right-enough consistency.
During that time as well, my friend’s daughter came with the mandarin oranges and helped me peel some of them.
Once all the pieces were ready and the thick and clear tapioca/orange jello mixture was cooled a bit, I stirred it all together and took a taste. Edible, but not as good as I was hoping, probably because there was way too much tapioca and water for too little orange jello.
That night, though, I remembered that when I had looked at the ingredients on the box of tapioca pudding online, it said that the first ingredient was sugar, and it wasn’t purely tapioca. Hmm, that could be part of the problem, too! I added some sugar to the portion I had set aside for myself, and other than the crunch it added, it did make it taste better. So as soon as I finish this, I’ll go and try to add some sugar to the orange jello salad of yesterday and hope that the sugar will be absorbed by the time we eat it.
And maybe next time I’ll decide I’m hungry for orange jello salad when I’m in a place where I can actually get the ingredients!
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