Well, you learn something new every day

I tend to have mini food obsessions ...where I will be so infatuated with an ingredient or a recipe that I will eat it practically every day for a month or months. Then, I will grow tired of it and move on to something else. My latest is yams. I have been baking them daily since Thanksgiving. At first I was making candied yams but now I'm just foiling the whole yam, putting it in a 425 oven for about 45 mins....awesome. So, the other day when I was at Costco I picked up a big box of sweet potatoes. I baked two of them last night; after I started chowing down, I realized that sweet potatoes are not the same as yams. I always thought they were, I just assumed the names were interchangeable in the same way that garbanzo beans are also called ceci beans or chickpeas. The yam is syrupy sweet, orange in color and has a fluffier, potato like texture where I found the sweet potato to look a little paler, have the taste and the texture a little bit like cross between a butternut and an acorn squash. They are both good but not the same thing.