Stuffing!!!!!

So, my mother-in-law's recipe for stuffing really doesn't call for 4 pounds of butter. But that's what I buy every year because of the way my husband wrote it down when he asked his mother how to make stuffing about 20 years ago. I always swear it says 3-4 lbs of butter and it's really 3/4 lbs of butter. Logically that makes more sense, but my husband always said there's lots of butter in here and that makes it good. So I always buy the larger quantity of butter knowing we'll use it if I'm wrong and bought too much.

My mother-in-law was talking a mile a minute and my husband was writing it down on any available piece of paper; notepad, scraps, envelopes and post-its. There are even several colors of ink. It's all now stained with butter! I finally scanned it so I could keep it for posterity. But all the original pieces are still in my recipe book. I don't think anyone else ever wrote it down. It was a "secret" recipe passed woman to woman. But I think we're beyond that now. I don't make it, my husband does!

I'm sure the original recipe was passed on from several generations and has had changes made along the way. But this is how we make it. Our adult children crave it at the holidays and our son's wife just asked us how to make it. So here is the recipe. Good luck interpreting it and trying to read it, I never can. I hope you have other recipes to use that extra butter with.

Sweetpotatoes or Yams?

All of our friends always get together the Saturday after Thanksgiving and have a big party. We basically do another Thanksgiving feast and everyone brings their favorite dishes and our hosts deep fry the turkey outside. The men really enjoy this part because there is always the threat of danger when deep frying a turkey. Thankfully they know what they are doing and haven't burned the house down. This year I am bringing my little sweetpotato pies. The recipe is simple and my family always devours every one of them.

We plan our parties by email. We are quite effiecient at planning that way, since we are all so busy. A controversy started when my dish was listed under dessert instead of side dishes on the menu. Someone said we didn't have any yams. Someone else stated they remember seeing sweetpotato pie on the menu. Someone else said pie and sweetpotato spuds are not the same and yams were completely different. It was also pointed out that we still needed yams because pie would be a mungie concoction and collection of ingredients blended to a pulp. While a whole yam or sweetpotato cooked the way God meant it to be-baked at 350 until ready (about an hour) was also still needed on the menu. I guess everyone has their own opinion as to the best recipe for sweetpotatoes and/or yams.

Just to be clear according to the Sweetpotato Council of California all yams in the United States are actually sweetpotatoes. They belong to the morning glory family and are native to tropical areas of the Americas. Apparently the sweetpotatos and yams that we always see in the grocery store are actually both sweetpotatoes. Yes, even the dark orange one is a sweetpotato. I guess that's why I'm always confused as to which is which when I go to the store. Yams actually come from a different plant species and is a native of Africa. They are not usually grown in the United States nor are they marketed here. Although they are very similar and can be substituted for sweet potatoes in most recipes.

So we will be having both "yams" and sweet potato pie, but I will be using the orange sweetpotato for my pie because it's a little sweeter.

Here's my mom's recipe for little sweetpotato pies. It's never really been written down before so I'll walk you through it. You bake whole sweetpotatoes, I use the orange ones, at 350 for about an hour until they are cooked through. Let them cool off enough to handle and scoop the insides out into a bowl. Mash it up. Then you fill individual serving size graham cracker crusts with the sweetpotatoes, add a pat of butter and sprinkle with brown sugar. Bake until heated through and butter and sugar melt in a 350 oven, about 15-30 minutes depending on if your potatos were still warm or had cooled completely off. So, no, it's not a mungie concoction and collection of ingredients. I don't even think mungie is a word, but it wasn't my word!

No matter how you serve your sweetpotatoes or yams this Thanksgiving, I hope you spend it the people you love. Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Spice Cake

Every celebration in my childhood was blessed with a spice cake that my grandma made. It was my favorite. It didn't matter if there was birthday cake or pumpkin pies there was always spice cake too. I always had a piece of everything. "Yes, I'll have a piece of spice cake with my pumpkin pie and pecan pie. Yes, put whip cream on top the pies." It's a wonder I don't weigh 300 pounds.

Just the smell of spice cake brings me right back to climbing the trees in my grandparents backyard and sitting at the redwood picnic table with the red checked table cloth. Good times.

When my daughter-in-law stated she wanted a dark rum spiked spice cake for their Renaissance themed wedding I thought of my grandma's spice cake recipe. I hadn't made it in a long time. One of the main ingredients is lard. It's not for the diet conscious. The only thing was it didn't have rum in it. So I looked up spice cakes online and discovered some fascinating facts about spice cake. Most spice cakes do indeed have rum in them. I'm sure that my grandmother omitted the rum when she put her recipe together, Grandma and Grandpa didn't drink. I don't know where she got her original recipe, but family members don't remember a time when she didn't make it.

Another interesting fact is that rum spice cakes are very popular in the West Indies and Caribbean Islands dating back to the 17th century. The cake is very dense, full of dried fruits and keeps quite well with all the rum. There have been rumors that my great grandfather Gibson was from the West Indies. All hearsay, but he was much older than my great grandmother and looked exotic in the few photos I've seen of him. He looked nothing like a farmer in Oklahoma. Before he met my great grandmother he was a world traveler. So it's possible he could have been from anywhere.