Advice to anyone who goes to an African food market to buy a yam:

• Yams ain't sweet potatoes (even though they're often synonymous in southern American cuisine).
• Know what they look like. There are many different roots and tubers in the grocery section of any such store. I counted at least a half-dozen varieties I didn't recognize.
• They're really, really big. Even though your recipe calls for 1 lb. of yam, the smallest one in the store was 3 lbs.

Gonna try it out later, thanks to Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons, an African and Afro-/New World cookbook Pam got me a while back.

So far, the stuff's really tasty with two caveats:

• It's not nearly as spicy as I expected. A real let down in that respect after eating Indian, Thai and Mexican. Solution: Add more peppers than the recipe calls for.
• God damn, there is a lot of pig fat in the African-American recipes: lard, bacon, salted pork, fat back, ham hock, etc. Solution: use a reduced amount, use vegetable oils where possible (e.g. peanut for deep-frying).

I also used the bake-fry method for cassava (yuca) chips, and they came out well. Paraphrasing Healthy Latin Cooking, you toss the food in oil and then bake it in the oven.

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