Sweet Potatoes or Yams? You tell me.

This was to be a post about making Pumpkin Soup with Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef. But I got side tracked. The recipe called for a sweet potato. I always get confused because anytime a recipe calls for a sweet potato and there is a photo accompanying the recipe, it is always a Yam. So really people what is the difference? I guess in reality we don't actually have Yam's here is the U.S. so both the orange flesh and white fleshed tubers are sweet potatoes. Since I was unsure, I got one of each and used half of each in the soup. As fate would have it, I didn't like the soup. I like pumpkin alright, pie, cake, bread . . . but the soup just didn't win me over. I pulled out all the stops, an organic pie pumpkin and homemade chicken stock, hoping for an over the top sort of outcome.

If it weren't for the left over yam and sweet potato halves I would have felt sorry for myself, having spent all that time and effort for nothing. Well not exactly nothing, after all I did find some friends to enjoy the soup. I know the soup was good, very good for that matter, it just wasn't a taste that appealed to me so I was happy to deliver it to friends. I am not exactly a fan of sweet potato or yams either but I do have a thing about waste so I decided to make sweet potato fries, oven roasted.

If you have been following my gluten-free tales you know I am a sucker for french fries and will go to the end of the earth to find safely fried french fries. Most restaurants fry their fries in a fryer that also fries breaded foods, thus contaminating what would otherwise be gluten-free. So sad! It is mighty hard to find french fries that have been fried in a dedicated frier.

I cut the tubers, drizzled them in olive oil and sprinkled them with kosher salt and pepper and then oven roasted them at 450 degrees for about 20 minutes, turning once. They were gone in the blink of an eye and another yam and sweet potato have already been purchased for round two, this evening. When I get onto something, I get onto it. I will probably be having these for days to come. I don't care if I ever have french fries again. These are to die for!