Coconut Tapioca Pudding with Mango Sauce

Back in London. Back to my winter jacket and a runny nose.

Tuscany and its hills, famous estates, breathtaking vineyards and villas showed me the most fairy-like landscape I ever visited. Now I’ve got something like 800 pictures of this little trip, meaning that there’s a good chance I’ll be able to pick 8-10 images to share with you.

For the moment let me go back to my recent visit to Wembley, an area of northwest London and home to the famous Wembley Stadium, the second largest in Europe. Metallica, The Killers, Coldplay and AC/DC have performed in this stadium.

While the majority of Londoners head to Wembley either to watch the English football team or Robbie Williams wriggling on stage like a mad squirrel I go there to taste the authentic southern Indian cuisine because of my foodie traveler soul to satisfy. Wembley has a high degree of ethnic diversity but the Indian community is predominant and it is guaranteed, being the area out of reach for tourists, that I am going to savour genuine and local curry.

Of course I cannot resist the temptation of shopping at local markets too and try out new ingredients: this time I brought home foods like tapioca pearls and sweet bites made with sesame seeds called “gingelly”. I enjoyed the kinda posh idea of having pearls as a dessert, beautiful drops of cassava starch for a delicate and exquisite pudding. Tell me, doesn’t this look a bit luxurious?

p.s. The mango sauce is dark and dense since I used coconut sugar, my favorite sweetener which I first tried here in a smoothie. The pearls need to be soaked for at least a couple of hours in water: they will double in size and get ready for cooking in milk/coconut milk, which if you ask me, cannot be replaced by water or other liquids if we want a structured dessert and not just a mild gelatinous porridge.