F is for Frog Eyes. Or is it Fish Eyes? Fish Eggs? Frog Eggs?

Both of my parents came from rural backgrounds. They ate rabbit. They ate food from their own gardens. They had chickens for eggs. They did not eat possum, although my mom said when she was a girl, they were invited to Sunday dinner at the home of one of their poor relations and were, indeed, served possum. They all managed to avoid eating it somehow. I've spent my life eating various country foods, but this one I never ran across.

Frog Eye Salad.

In all honesty, when I read the name of the salad, I was expecting some kind of savory salad and it made me a little queasy just to think about it, even though I highly doubted it contained real frog eyes. I was quite relieved to read the rest of the recipe.

The frog eyes are pasta. Tiny, round pasta shapes called Acini de Pepe, larger than couscous, smaller than tapioca. 

Of course, you cannot BUY
Acini de Pepe pasta where I live,
and I had to order it from Amazon,
and I had to buy two boxes

The recipe can easily be found on the internet, but I used the one from Six Sisters' Stuff, because I have used their recipes before and have found them to be easy to follow and trustworthy. They let me down just a bit when they said, "It's incredibly easy to make," because it wasn't. And it required a great deal of bowls and pans and I made a tremendous mess with it.

I didn't get all the ingredients in the photo, because I wasn't sure I had coconut when I took it, but it turns out, I did. Also forgot the pineapple tidbits for the photo:

A note on ingredients: the recipe called for 22 oz of mandarin oranges, drained, but mandarin oranges come in 15 oz cans and the math and measuring was too much for me, so I just used two cans. I suppose it's yet another supply chain issue that there weren't any little cans of crushed pineapple at the store, so I went with the big can. My next debate was whether or not to measure out 8 ounces from a 20 ounce can, but again, math. Put the whole damn can in (and yes, I drained it first). 

The first step is to cook the pasta. I've never cooked tiny little pasta balls before and wasn't sure how long it would take but figured it would be pretty quick. I figured wrong. It took 9 minutes. The pasta had to be drained as soon as it was done and rinsed with cold water. This served da double duty as the pasta needed to be cool before mixing it with the other ingredients.

Uncooked.

Cooked. Looks like eggs, not eyes

Next, I made the custard from the drained pineapple juice, sugar, flour, salt, and a beaten egg. I literally dumped them in the pan and started whisking it, which I regret, because the flour was lumpy and the egg! Well, let's say the egg wasn't beaten as much as it should have been, and may or may not have formed some little bits of solid egg white that I had to pick out. It's very possible (completely possible) that I missed a few of those bits, but the coconut hid it and all's well that ends well. I cooled the custard sauce by placing the bowl inside a saucepan of ice water. 

Now, I have a pan that I used for the custard, one I used for the pasta, a measuring cup that held pineapple juice, four empty cans, two bowls for the two different types of pineapple, one bowl for the mandarin oranges, sugar spilled on the counter, pineapple juice splashed everywhere, little bits of egg white in the sink, pasta balls on the counter (because I liked to look at them), By the time I spilled shreds of coconut on the counter, dropped mini marshmallows everywhere, and realized entirely too late, as I was folding in the Cool Whip, that I chose too small a bowl to mix all the parts together and had frog eye salad overflowing the bowl.

The good news is it was pretty good. The frog eye aspect is a little weird. Kind of like eating tapioca, but the texture is different. It also looked more like frog EGGS than frog eyes and then I kept calling them fish eggs and fish eyes and it DOES matter, because eating something called "frog eyes" is more appealing than eating something called "fish eyes" and I'll fight you on that.

My taste testers all approved, although one of them weirded herself out over the texture of the fish eyes, I mean, pasta.

It was a good, but odd, salad. My kitchen looked like someone had stirred it with a stick by the time I was done. I have enough frog eye salad in my fridge to feed an army. And I have a box and a half of Acini de Pepe pasta leftover, so if someone wants to send me a recipe that uses it that is NOT frog eye salad, that would be awesome; otherwise, I'm going to feel obligated to make three more batches of it.