Welcome to November! I'm glad you're here! 

    In the USA, many families with children have just finished celebrating Halloween, a fun night of bright and imaginative costumes, parties and events, scary and thrilling movies, and hunting for candy door-to-door by walking through neighborhoods with other friends and family. Pumpkins and Jack-o-lanterns and ghosts and cartoon characters abound!

     What comes next, however, is the Holiday Season in the USA and in many countries around the world. Here is the US, with Thanksgiving, Hannukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and other celebrations leading up to New Year's Eve, we have a lot of cooking and baking to do!

     In my house, for Thanksgiving, along with the requisite roast turkey and ham, along with the cranberry sauce, apple pie, green bean casserole, we absolutely MUST have our collard greens, our cornbread, our macaroni and cheese, and our Sweet Potato Pie!

     Sweet Potato Pie is a Southern American tradition dating back hundreds of years, and it is a holiday staple - a "must-have" - in most African-American households all over the world. Passed down through the years from grandmothers to grandchildren, and a veritable tradition to learn, Sweet Potato Pie is near and dear to many hearts, and a closely-guarded secret in many households, even though you can find the recipe all over the internet. Many of us remember our grandmothers and aunties through sweet potato pie and hours in the kitchen, so yes, it is a very special dessert.

(Here is my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother and father at my mother's college over 50 years ago. I was on the way then! These are the ladies whose Sweet Potato Pie recipe now resides in my heart!)

     But do you know that most Americans, unless they are from the South or they are African-American, do not really know what Sweet Potato Pie is? Because it looks very similar to Pumpkin Pie, and most of the spices used are the same, many unknowing Americans assume it is the same. IT IS NOT!

In any case, you absolutely must taste authentic, homemade Sweet Potato Pie. Not pie sold in big department stores or mass-produced with preservatives and inferior ingredients, but pies made with Love!

- Jenny Davenport

I used to live in Japan and, if I still did, I could make a pie for you. (Maybe in the future.) But meanwhile, I can actually live stream or teach you how by Skype or Zoom. If you would like to learn, I invite you to sign up for my 3-Class lesson pack or to contact me about doing a live workshop.