Yams.

[Ianab]

Well I was at the supermarket today getting groceries. I had grabbed some early season "NZ Yams". Rest of the world seem to call them Oca, but anyway, they are small sweet but tangy root vege, related to the oxalis weed. 

Anyway I get to the checkout, and there is new girl on, nice enough and doing her job. But she looks in the paper bag and goes "what are these?" I may have been the first person to buy yams at her checkout, last week they didn't have any, and she wasn't there either. Anyway, I told her it was yam, and she taps "y" on her terminal, and it has a picture of a yam that matches. All good. But she had never seen one in her ~20 odd years on the planet. 

But the made me curious, because a lot of folks talk about "yams". So a bit of research it seems that what the US call "Yams" is actually sweet potato, that we call Kumara. In SE Asia they refer to Taro as a "Yam". Where a true Yam is a whole other species, but also has an edible tuber.

Anyway, it's also kumara harvest season, so I got some of them too, and she did know what those were. 

[customsawyer]

One of the ones that always cracks me up is flour and water. It's a couple of basic ingredients but depending on what part of the world you live in they sure make some different products from it. 

[Magicman]

flour and water

Add shortening, etc. and you have the makings for dumplings.  PatD made a pot-o-chinken-n-dumplings Wednesday. 

Yup, we call um yams but if baked whole, they are sweet taters.  We have um 'bout every week and they make poots.

[Jeff]

I though a yam for years as a child was a cartoon sailor that ate spinach.

I need to make a sweet potato casserole from Miss Pats recipe when I get feeling better.

[Ianab]

I'll call them Kumara to avoid confusion. 

From the pantry, the one of the left is a NZ Yam (oca). The other 2 are different varieties of Kumara. 

The Kumara are subtropical, so really only grow well in the more Northern parts of NZ. They were a traditional food of the Maori, pre European times. It's generally considered that they bought them back from South America during their voyages, and spread them across the various Pacific Islands. It's late Autumn here now, so kumara harvest time, and they are priced sensibly. 

The NZ Yams are more cold tolerant, but smaller tubers. 

Anyway, enough looking at sweet potatoes / yams / kumara. I'm off to make a chicken / coconut / kumara curry in the slow cooker. Makes the house smell wonderful the whole day, and that's dinner sorted. 

[SwampDonkey]

We have yams here which are yellow when cooked and sweet potato that are orange. The sweet potato can be grown here, and it is mostly what you see in the stores.

The yam was a food staple in Nigeria and probably other African nations. I read a fictional book one time in school by Chinua Achebe that mentions yams, however the book was mostly about colonialism.

There are a couple wild tubers here also , one called a groundnut and another Indian cucumber root. I have seen and eaten Indian cucumber root, tastes like a potato, but they are small. medeola virginiana

[WV Sawmiller]

   I always grew up thinking of yams as the orange sweet potatoes common in the southern USA. IN Cameroon in central Africa the sweet potatoes there were white but tasted pretty much the same. The locals there grew what they called Coco yams which I read is also called Taro. I knew of elephant ear as an ornamental plant where I grew up in NW Fla but did not know it was a food staple in other parts of the world.

https://www.lnps.org/coco-yam-elephant-ear/

  

[Ianab]

Yeah, Taro is related to Elephant Ear plant, and is also called a yam in some places. It's a staple in the Cook Islands, and probably the most farmed crop on Rarotonga. Basically large fields of it being cultivated on swampy ground. Traditionally the farmers would use coconut or banana leaves around the plants, to retain water and smother weeds. Now they often use old cardboard. Both eventually compost down into the soil when the field is cultivated after harvest, and it solves the waste cardboard problem. 

This is a more traditional taro garden up in the hills, probably used since pre European days. The small stream has been dammed and water diverted into these shallow ponds to grow a different species of Taro.  Will be locals maintaining it, mostly as a hobby I guess. Keeping the old traditions alive etc. 

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