kinako

Miso Teacakes with Buckwheat and Kinako Graham Crackers

  Food envy is real and it starts early. For me, it started in primary school. Looking back, I am not sure what I thought I was missing but whenever I caught a glance of the contents of my classmate Victoria’s lunchbox, I was green with envy. Instead of sandwiches made with thick slices of wholemeal sourdough bread, her sandwiches were made with white bread rolls, a once in a while weekend treat at our house. In place of the small Cox apples my mum picked up at the weekly apple stand just around the corner from our paediatrician’s office, Victoria’s lunchbox had candy bars. For Victoria, lunch was washed down with Capri sun orange juice instead of my homemade ice tea (half fruit tea, half apple juice).  At my primary school swapping lunch boxes wasn’t really a thing, but I certainly came very close to considering it when Victoria brought in a sandwich that took my food envy to

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Kinako, Sesame and Muscovado Financiers

While some people seem to struggle to get their head around Japanese sweets, I fell head over heels in love with mochi, matcha and black sesame anything and everything when Alessandro and I went to Japan 5 years ago.  Unlike matcha or black sesame, kinako was never the star of any of the sweet confections we tried yet it was still present, dusted over glutinous rice flour dumplings or ice cream, adding a deliciously nutty flavour. Kinako, better known as roasted soybean flour outside of Japan, means ‘yellow flour’ in Japanese and that is exactly what it looks like.  It is made by pulverizing roasted and skinned yellow soya beans (although you can also buy kinako made from whole soya beans).  Apparently you can also buy kinako made from green soya beans which has a greenish hue.  Although you can make your own kinako, it is much easier to pick up a small bag at a Japanese supermarket (especially as

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Black Sesame Loaf with a Kinako Glaze

 Alessandro and I came back from our trip to Laos and Thailand a few days ago.  We have been back in Rome just long enough to take care of mountains of laundry but are still fighting our jet lag on a daily basis.  The day after we arrived the packing materials for my move to Brussels arrived and thanks to surprisingly decent day-time TV (House MD, Gilmore Girls, Friends re-runs) one of the walls of our living room is now made up of stacks of boxes, some taped shut already, others waiting to be filled. I have moved a lot in the last few years and far too many of those moves have been of the international kind.  I love having had the opportunity to live in so many different places and countries but let’s just say that international moves are even more fun (read: stressful) than moving already is.  It inevitably starts with flathunting in a different country and

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