In Brazil the main starches are rice, corn/maize flour, some potatoes, and cassava. Cassava is also called manioc, mandioca (that may just be Portuguese), tapioca and again just here in Brazil it's macaxeira (mah-ka-SHAY-ra). They use mandioca flour for a lot of things, very interesting things. You can of course make tapioca pudding, and you can make cakes out of it. But what they call 'tapioca' is a snack made by sprinkling the mandioca flour in a pan, where it somehow sticks together, you flip it, and then sprinkle butter on it and roll it up like a crepe. It's incredibly filling.

This morning I made one of my family's special recipes, a dutch baby. It was hard to explain powdered sugar, but eventually we found it in the grocery store. But at the last minute, an assumption of mine came out that meant we needed to buy one more ingredient. Wheat flour is not something Sandra keeps in the house! Now we have a bag, so I can cook more American food, in which almost everything uses 'farinha de trigo' or wheat flour.