Yampy

Yampy Bin, C-Town, Inwood

I came across these little fellas in a bin close to the floor in the produce aisle of the Inwood C-Town (I do a lot of shopping there for whatever I can't get at the Farmer's Market or the CSA). The Inwood C-Town has a pretty good selection of vegetables and tubers for Caribbean cuisine. I'd just started experimenting with yams and sweet potatoes. "Yampy" sounded like a cute yam to me so I decided to see what I could do with them.

Knowing that just about anything works fine in a tagine (except for unsliced kumquats) I peeled (somebody went all out waxing these things) and sliced them up and added them in. 

Raw yampi are described as mucilaginous which is not how I want to think of any food, especially during allergy season. I'd prefer to say they are slippery when peeled (there's a title for an album). Thankfully, this slipperiness cooks away, and in the case of a tagine, you are left with something like a boiled potato except yampis are even less tasteful. They do do a good job of taking on the taste of the food around them and are a nice change up texturally. 

If you come across them, why not give them a try? Look for Yampy, Yampi, Cushcush, Indian yam, napi, Yampie (Jamaica), Maona (Peru), Mapuey (Puerto Rico), Aja (Cuba); Cara doce (Brazil) or if you want to get scientific,  Dioscorea trifida.

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Kumquats

I was recently introduced to these little guys as a fruity snack. It didn't take long before I started thinking about ways to cook them. So far I've tried roasting and braising - here I've put them into a tagine with chicken, tomatilloes and jicama.

Tasty, small, sweet on the outside, tart on the inside, pop them into your mouth unpeeled. It's up there with eating peanut shells, shrimp tails or lobster tamale for shock value. They're well behaved when traveling, unlike berries with their sensitive skins, prone to rupture and sticky juice before you get to where you're going, the kumquat is going to arrive intact, its sensible orange peel keeping everything inside. Having to peel these grape-sized things would be a pain in the keester though I'm keen to try something made with kumquat zest some time.

The same thick skinned (relative to berries) -ness that makes them good travel companions can cause problems when you cook them. Problems if you don't cut them up a bit first that is. If you're going to cook them I recommend cutting them in halves or quarters, removing obvious seeds. (No need to go crazy removing seeds if you can eat the thing whole in the first place.) This will allow the super tart insides of the kumquats to dissipate. I didn't do that with all my kumquats in the tagine and cold tart is pretty good but hot tart is not so tasty. Hot, tart kumquat juice will make you pucker.