On the first day of Christmas I made this for me din'...

...a Partridge in a Pear Tin.


Merry Christmas!


from


The Tin Cannoisseur

More sweet potato? No thanks...

Another All-American acquisition of mine recently was this tin of Princella Cut Sweet Potatoes, or Yams as they are also known on that side of the pond (over here the term "yam" tends to refer to the massive log-like vegetables you see stacked up outside African food shops).

Princella claim to be "America's Leading Sweet Potato" - though the accolade of "America's Favorite Yam" apparently belongs to a rival company called Bruce's Yams (so they say on their website, anyway, the brilliantly-named YamRight.com). Both companies will no doubt have been selling plenty of their products of late though, as sweet potatoes also form an important part of the traditional Thanksgiving dinner, whether that be on their own as a side vegetable, made into a sweet potato pie, or most commonly topped with marshmallows and baked in the oven, to be served alongside the turkey itself. As a Brit, for whom cranberry or apple sauce is about the sweetest thing we ever have to accompany a roast, this took some getting used to the first time I experienced a Thanksgiving dinner.

Give thanks to the pumpkin

Once again I find myself catching up on the blog after a hectic period at work and then a couple of weeks away, so I didn't have time back at the end of November to write up my Thanksgiving exploits.

Not that I was actually celebrating the occasion in any real way - being British born and bred, Thanksgiving obviously doesn't really feature on my radar at all, and I have only ever experienced the traditional dinner once, in Austria of all places, where I was working on a teaching programme which also had lots of American participants, who very kindly invited me to join in with their celebrations.

There does however seem to have been an increased interest here in Britain in the kind of dishes served up on the other side of the pond for Thanksgiving - not least the ubiquitous pumpkin pie. So much so in fact, it's now quite easy to find the ready-prepared, canned version of the dessert's most important ingredient - pumpkin puree - in supermarkets over here.

It's still not cheap though, with a tin of Libby's 100% Pumpkin generally setting you back around £2. I was delighted therefore to have spotted a heavily-dented can a few months back, reduced to a truly bargainous 20p. I couldn't say no.