My Puerto Rican neighbor cooked and served to me delicious bacalao the other day, however, I'm still confused about which vegetable he served with it, as it was something I've never had before. He actually showed to me all of the simple ingredients before he cooked them, but then I went out on an errand and came back later for dinner.
Now I know there's always confusion regarding yams and sweet potatoes, and sometimes I get even more confused after reading an article about what is the difference. He did include what I refer to as the sweet potato--or from googling it--I guess it's properly referred to as a soft sweet potato (orange flesh). I didn't even realize that there are sweet potatoes with white flesh.
But it's the other root vegetable that I'm confused about. He showed me a long, brown, kind of rough-skinned root with a lot of wax on it and yellow flesh inside, and I asked, "Isn't that yuca?" But he kept using the Spanish word that sounded something like yam and finally came to the conclusion that it was yam in English. Now is yuca and cassava the same thing? I've never cooked with or really eaten either one. I mean, I've had yuca chips, but that's about it.
He boiled it and served it with a lot of olive oil, and it was mild, sweet, and delicious. But it was quite fibrous including a very tough inner stem that at first I thought was a fishbone. He indicated that maybe some people eat that part, but it is rather tough--too tough for me. So I pulled it out and discarded it. But in all of the articles that I keep searching on google, I can't actually find any that indicate that either real yams or cassava/yuca contain tough inner fibers.
Does anyone know exactly what it was that I ate? Or hazard a guess? Have I provided enough information? I'm still confused. Maybe I'll have to go back to the store where he purchased it in order to find out exactly. It's a store in our neighborhood--an Italian grocery store, actually.