I’m like this about two foods at the Winter holidays – cranberry sauce and yams. I have made my yams the same way for 25 years. It’s an uneventful but satisfying concoction involving butter, brown sugar, bourbon and cream. It’s not that I don’t enjoy other cooks yam creations when I’m a guest in their homes for the holidays, but my yams – in my humble opinion – are still the best.

And let’s face it, how much can you really do with a yam? Variations on a standard theme almost always turn out to be related. So at last weeks Christmas dinner, where I dinned in someone else’s house, I took my customary scoop of the yam dish from the buffet table. I was pleased that they were part of the meal, but had no great expectations. After all these were not “my yams.”

But at fist bite – brown sugar smacking my lips, oranges doing a jig on my tongue and butter basting the back of my pallet – I was scandalized by the starchy tubular vegetable I had just eaten. These were in fact the best yams I’d ever tasted – damn it. That one instant had made mince-meat of my decades long yam dish history and a new tradition was born.

I was liberal in my compliments on the cooking and the hostess – my stepmother Anne’s cousin Crissa, was generous with her recipe. I’m already planning on doing a test run of my new favorite yam dish for New Years dinner.

Traditions, like everything else, can adapt and evolve with time – a good thing to remember as we head into a new year. Even the most ordinary of things, can surprise us, delight us, and put us on a new path of discovery (culinary and otherwise). We only have to say “Please pass the yams.”

RECIPE

Yohwser Yams

Chrissa was kind enough to tell me what she put in this recipe and how she prepared it, but we did not get into the particulars of amounts and she didn’t share a recipe title. I’ve named them Yohwser Yams - since that was the expression that popped into my mind when I tasted them. As with all good cooks you’ll have to use the ingredients and directions below as the basis for the dish and make the rest up as you go along.  Alternatively, find a good baked yam dish in a cookbook and start weaving in the ingredients from this recipe as appropriate.

Ingredients:
Yams
Butter
Brown Sugar
Honey
Whole Oranges
Salt and cinnamon to taste

Directions: In a large casserole dish place a layer of sliced yams on the bottom. Cover them with a bit of butter, brown sugar and a smidge of salt and micro-pinch of cinnamon if you so desire. Add onto a layer of thinly sliced oranges (peel included). Repeat this entire process until you reach the top of the casserole dish. Last, pour honey over the entire top and bake at 350 degrees for 2-3 hours.  Let rest in the refrigerator for a day, then make a second day at 350 for one hour. Serve the yam dish on the third day, after re-heating at 350 for one hour.  Chrissa says that the secret to these yams is to cook, and recook them until they have melded into one soft, juicy, buttery mass of side dish goodness.