Yuki from Yukitchen describes herself as a Japanese vegetarian who cooks her inner-child into a dish. Promoting cute and happy recipes that are inspired by her favorite animation films and cartoons, her dishes are exclusively vegetarian, with an emphasis on healthy ingredients.
Amongst her more popular recipes, you’ll find Panda boba, ninja nikujaga, polar bear ramen, and Yuki’s absolute favorite, Ohmu-rice. “They are all ‘cute’, but it’s just a narrative,” writes Yuki, explaining that the subtext is that they are all-natural. “I only use the ingredients that come from nature,” she writes on her website.
She also notes that radiant colors such as green come from fresh spinach or matcha, while bitter-sweet pink comes from cranberries and beetroots, and blue is a mix of egg whites with purple potatoes. “Nature, or I should say, how we can never deny the power of nature, never fail to surprise me.”
According to Yuki, while promoting vegetarianism is important to her, her Kawaii dishes also serve as a form of healing. “I came from an extremely rigorous Japanese family,” she writes. “Some of you might have thought that I came from a Disney-endorsing background, but I was more like a background actor from a Kurosawa film of the samurai complexity.” She explains that cooking cute meals retroactively “fixes” her childhood.
“I was born and raised in Japan, to extremely old-fashioned parents,” she further explained in an interview with Candiware. “My mother works full-time in Japan, but she never skipped cooking homemade meals for me. I began to notice my lifelong interest in food while she taught me how to cook. ‘Be a good cook.’ She used to say, ‘You’ll make someone you love happy.'”
She adds that her website is a place for her to express her love for whole foods transformed into cuteness, inspired by her deep passion for animals, movies, animations, and video games.
