Achieve World Peace…if used skillfully, young Padawan. 
Two words:
Make yam-ade.
When I saw the title “What can I do with three pounds of yams?”, Karen Finley was the first thought in my head.
Why, yes, I DO need professional help. However did you know?
In “Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook,” Alice (Remember Alice? This is a song about Alice)–anyway, Alice describes how she gave a party and only served sweet potatoes, but had a bunch of accompaniments–butter, sour cream, whipped cream, pecans, apple rings, pineapple and some other stuff. Use your imagination and go wild.
Am I the only one who keeps reading the thread title as “What can I do with three pounds of *yarn[/]?” and gets excited about a knitting thread every time until I remember what it really says half a second later?
No?
Well, carry on, then…
Sweet potatoes are not yams. Yams, as cowgirl has, are white with purpley skins.
“Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew”. Or, there’s always Bammy, a Jamaican thing which more or less works out to a yam latke. Spice it up, though.
Here are a few to get you started. The yam brownies sound especially interesting.
And from the Wiki link:
And from the article’s internal sweet potato link:
So it looks like what you buy in the supermarket – whether white or orange – is a ‘sweet potato’.
Maybe at YOUR supermarket, but not in these parts. I know my yams from my sweet potatoes and they are different veggies entirely. (I figured it all out in Brazil, where yams are a staple and sweet potatoes (like the ones we eat so much up here) are unknown.)
Yams are less sweet and more starchy and fibrous, and are extensively used in the kinds of regional cuisine that people cook in my neighbourhood (which I guess is full of “specialty markets such as those that serve Asian or Caribbean communities” - looks like Wikipedia may need some region-specific tweaking, as my Canadian neighbourhood is full of Asian or Caribbean communities; a “specialty market” would be one that did NOT sell yams!) There’s one store where I can get about eight different types of yam (some of which are pieces of larger ones which could easily have been 7 feet long, and some of which are several feet long on their own). They usually have brown skin (although mine are purple) which is often fibrous, like a coconut. Sometimes the skin is waxy.
More things in heaven and earth, and so on.
Thanks for the recipes, melondeca. I’ll try the Spicy African Yam Soup next.
For those keeping score, the coconut/banana/yam soup was delish, but it does require the curry paste to spice it up (I used red curry but green would work just as well). Also I recommend using ripe bananas so they will disintegrate and make the flavour nice, rather than lurking as mushy soggy things. The yams provide sufficient mush and sog for me. And next time I will add a spoonful of peanut butter.