Houston is going all out with the summer temps lately. This weekend was forecasted to be breaking all-time high. No wonder I’ve been getting cravings for boba milk tea aka bubble tea.
A trip to your favorite Asian grocery store and navigating through its parking is the most difficult process in making this cold tea. Once you’ve got the ingredients, everything else is easy!
First get the tapioca pearls. You will need to boil these in 3-4 minutes depending on how soft you want it to be. Mine is exactly 3 minutes and 43 seconds. Haha.
There are several flavors to choose from. I got my favorites: the green tea, Thai tea and plain milk tea. Follow the packages for direction. Add cooked tapioca, then ice.
Roma opened last Friday. I may have mentioned this already, but I do give restaurants a bit of time before trying it out just for them to get the kinks out. I was particularly excited to try their fettuccine nero di seppia allo scoglio.
I’ve been seeing this dish more often. It is worth noting that there are actually two types of squid ink pasta. The first is with fresh squid cooked in a sauce with its own ink. This produces a very tangy sea flavor and a very interesting black color to the sauce. I had one of the best versions in Corniglia, Italy.
Note that the pasta is actually the normal yellowish-white color and the squid sauce makes the dish look black. There is fresh squid and tomatoes as well.
The other version is the actual pasta dough being infused with squid ink giving it a black color plus the sea flavor as well. This is what I had today at Roma.
Black-colored pasta with marinara sauce and clams and shrimps.
Both are excellent and delicious. Both will leave black stains in your teeth which is either gross or endearing, depending on your date. So you might want to skip this if you are out on a date and you are counting heavily on your smile to enamor you partner.
So….back to the new restaurant. It had an excellent selection of Italian wine, reasonably priced.
We had this wonderful Barolo, which pairs really well with….everything!Pre-squid ink smileFresh burratta mozzarella with prosciutto and blood orange. Lo and behold, Dave did not order steak. He, instead, had grilled octopus with crispy polentaWe had limoncella tarts for dessert–yum!
