I can’t tell the bottom from the top…

Ummm…actually, I can but it does not matter as I eat both parts – the tuber or the root…and also the leaves. Well, if you’re wondering what this is all about, I’m talking about the tapioca plant.

I love tapioca best – steamed or boiled with a sprinkling of salt and eaten with attap (nipah) sugar mixed with lard. The kuihs made with tapioca, for instance, the bingka bandong take second place. As for the leaves, I eat them fried or cooked as a soup. In this post, I will be featuring the steps in cooking the latter.

To do that, you need the leaves…

You can pound them by hand or use a blender…

You will need to pound some ginger as well…and some stalks of serai (lemon grass) will be needed too…

Brown the ginger in a bit of oil and throw in the serai…followed by the leaves. Add water to it and also one ikan bilis stock cube. Preferably you should use belacan (dried prawn paste) and add a chilli or two (cleaned and seeds removed) as well…but I’m giving some to my mother, so I had to do without those two items.

Finally, I added the ikan buris, the one-third of the river fish that I had left over after frying the rest of it for our Chap Goh Meh dinner. Simmer it for a while to let the sweetness of the fish seep into the soup…and add salt and msg according to taste.

There you have it, my tapioca leaves soup…

It would be nice to add some fresh young baby corn (anak jagung) as well and incidentally, instead of fish, you can substitute it with udang galah (freshwater prawns) and it will be equally, if not more, heavenly!! Drool!