Yesterday was the perfect summer day, breezy sunny day with very comfortable temperatures. Today it's raining most of the day and the weekend is going to be horribly ugly.....hazy, hot and humid.

Temperatures to be 32C feeling like 40C with the humidity (104). Kill me now.

I'm making pizzas on tortilla shells using the griddle, instead of the oven. It works perfectly.

I'm using up some frozen ravioli I found in the freezer with sauce from a jar and some Italian sausage and a green salad.

I made some very good bbq baby back ribs in my new Aroma cooker yesterday and we have half of them left over for dinner tonight with a salad with sliced avocado.

Very close to yours, Shirley. Baked salmon, macaroni and cheese, crispy baked asparagus fries. I can't wait!

I was going to make Taco Salad but DH just said not to make anything. He'll make himself a salad if he feels like it later. Happy, Happy. I'm very tired 4 days in a row of golf is too much for this old lady. I'm leaving on Monday with 7 other ladies for a three day golf trip….. I'll make some taco salad tomorrow along with a couple other dishes so DH has leftovers while I'm gone. I'll probably just have a bowl of cereal tonight.

I think I'll get a bowl of soup out of the freezer, and have that along with my first-of-the-season sliced cukes and onions in sour cream. I have bread nearly ready to come out of the oven, so that covers my needs, I think!

Friday is Crackerbarrel night for us. I always get the kids meal of grilled chicken cutlet wth a baked yam (up here, they mistakenly call it a sweet potato), and DH gets a stack of pancakes and scrambled eggs.

Monica, what is the difference between a sweet potato and a yam? Here they're called sweet potatoes.

I picked about a dozen tomatoes from our garden, a few cucumbers and a couple of jalapenos, and made a batch of gazpacho. (Although I used a yellow onion rather than a red onion or a vidalia onion, which was probably a mistake -- its too sharply onion-y.)

After that I made tortellini with chicken, broccoli, and mushrooms in a white wine/cream sauce.

We have sweet potatoes and yams in our grocery stores. Sweet potatoes are a lighter color, almost cream colored inside. Yams are light orange to dark orange. I don't care for either.

My point was, plant family wise, they're related, both are varieties of sweet potatoes. Neither one is a real yam though the name is used.

I'm pretty sure Snidely is right on this one. Light color, light orange, dark orange, nearly red or even purple, they are likely all actually sweet potatoes. Even if the sign the store puts up say "Yams" they are almost certainly sweet potatoes. Even if the label on the can says Yams, they're sweet potatoes.

This link might help:

http://www.ncsweetpotatoes.com/sweet-potatoes-101/difference-between-yam-and-sweet-potato/

That site also has a picture of actual yams

Sweet potatoes are round, like white potatoes and have pale yellow meat that has the texture of a white potato.

Yams are tubular on shape, dark skin, and the meat, when cooked, is fiberous and dark in color. The fiber makes them to mash.

Monica....that's the wrong information. Sweet potatoes are what we find in the grocery, some very large, some small....mostly tubular in shape. The color of the meat ranges from pale to deep orange.

I must say, though, that I've never seen a round sweet potato.

The differences are attributed to whatever variety was chosen by the farmer.

Click here for information.

Its confusing because it goes against what has been the accepted common knowledge since perhaps the early 1800's. The farmers growing them and calling them yams, are wrong. The grocers selling them and calling them yams, are wrong. The companies canning them and labeling them as yams, are wrong. The people who first introduced them to the United States called them yams, perhaps to distinguish them from the different variety of sweet potatoes that were already on the market, they were wrong too. Even some sites on the web that try to explain the difference with helpful images like this one:

http://www.frugallivingnw.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/yams-sweet-potatoes-is-there-a-difference-2.jpg

are wrong. (hint they are all sweet potatoes, despite their labels)

So it is not at all surprising that what I learned at a young age from my mother and grandmother, and which was continually re-enforced every Thanksgiving or every time I visited a grocery store, is wrong.

I have never eaten a true yam in my life, and seeing some of the pictures of what a true yam look like, I probably never will. Does it harm me in any way if other people choose to call some varieties of sweet potatoes "yams", no. It merely bothers the pedantic part of me a little when someone asserts something to be a fact, when they are in fact wrong.

I'm pretty sure that I grew up calling them yams but that was too long ago for me to remember for certain. Whatever you want to call them, I love them. Unless the word candied is used, lol.

I grew up "knowing" that they were two different names for the same things, just like mountain lion and cougar and puma. I also knew they could be used to make an awful side dish that thankfully was only ever made for thanksgiving. I also remember my grandmother making a pie and after we had eaten it she exclaimed "That wasn't pumpkin pie that was sweet potato pie, you ate it and you couldn't tell." All proud that she had tricked us. I really wanted to respond "I didn't know there was such a thing a "sweet potato pie" I merely thought it was the worst pumpkin pie ever made."

Just over the past few years I've learned that they are such a wonderful, flavorful, versatile vegetable that you can roast, or mash, or pan fry, or add to a curry, or puree with coconut milk, but as with Rhizo, please no candied, and please please no "sweet potato pie" ever again.