Thanksgiving has again come and gone. I'm enjoying a long weekend away from work. I've done a lot of baking. I've eaten a lot of dressing. I've gained three pounds. As I do year after year, I've again dealt with the dilemma that occurs at the intersection where my love of cooking crosses my families' stubborn, picky appetites.
The past few holidays have not gone particularly well. Two years ago there was the pecan pie that would never set (can't blame anyone but myself for that one...although I'm still trying to figure out what went wrong...). Also the squash casserole that no one seemed to eat. Still don't understand that one. My family all loves squash. Or so I thought. I made what I considered to be a delicious squash casserole. It was yummy! My aunt and grandmother liked it. My mother said she did, but I'm pretty sure she lied to preserve my feelings. At the end of the night I took home an almost untouched squash casserole! The explanation: they just prefer their squash fried! Oh, for the LOVE...
Last year there was the sweet potato debacle. I, myself, am not a fan, but my family seems to like them...so I volunteered to make them for both family functions. I peeled about a dozen and shoved the peels into the garbage disposal in what I thought was reasonable intervals. Fast forward to an hour later when my husband was disassembling the disposal and wet sweet potato mush was pouring out onto my kitchen floor! Looking back this was, while humorous, not one of my favorite moments in our marriage. And again, at the end of the Thanksgiving festivities, I was coming home with much fuller dishes than I would have liked. This year's excuses: Granddad doesn't like cinnamon, and there were too many competing sweets.
Now on to this year's Thanksgiving festivities. For my dad's family's get-together, my food assignments had been doled out weeks ago. I was instructed to make their favorite Texas sheet cake and a peach cobbler that everyone seems to love. Done. My mom's family was much more difficult. Determined to cook something to impress (fueled by my past failures), I analyzed the entire Thanksgiving lunch menu and finally found the obvious gap in the mealtime offerings...(drum roll, please)...sweet potatoes. And so I volunteered.
Follow this up with a desperate phone call to my mother, as I tried to figure out how to prepare them in such a way that my family would not turn their noses up at them. What followed was a vague overview of how my Grandmother used to prepare candied yams. A. very. vague. overview. I searched online and finally found a recipe that resembled what my mom described. It involved only 5 ingredients (a plus in my family's book!)...sweet potatoes, butter, sugar, water, and time.
Please note what ingredient was NOT a part of said recipe: yams*. There are none in there. Nevertheless the recipe proudly proclaims itself as "Yummy Candied Yams." And they were! Accordingly to my family, that is. I ate one bite to test them as I was removing them from the stove. I might as well have been eating a sugar packet. But, hey, whatever floats your boat. It is, after all, Thanksgiving! The "yams" were a hit! Even with my picky Grandfather! I let him keep all the leftovers and came home with nothing but my clean, empty dish! And still no yams were harmed in the process!
Q: How much sugar and butter does it take to turn a sweet potato into a yam?
A: No amount of sugar and butter can accomplish this, but if my family will eat them...WHO CARES?!
*Yams and sweet potatoes are not the same vegetable. They're not even close. While both are tubers, they aren't even related. Sweet potatoes come in both hard and soft varieties. When the soft variety was first sold commercially in the US, there was a need to differentiate them. They were referred to as "yams" because of their similarity to the African vegetable they resembled. However, unless you've ever specifically sought one out in an international market, you've probably never actually eaten a yam.
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