
Cute and delicious food art
Hi, I'm Yuki. I make cartoon-like food art to express my love for healthy eating.

Natural ingredients only
There's no need to use chemicals to dye your food. Nature is your ingredients.

Vegan and Vegetarian
What you see on Yukitchen doesn't contain any meat products.
Except, you know, Jabba the Hutt.

Childhood into a dish
My food art is inspired by my inner child.
Cooking is a place for me to express my regression, with a table spoon of nostalgia.

Chewbacca Hummus
When I first saw Star Wars, I didn’t really understand it. I was around 9, keeping myself busy with learning how to write my name in Kanji, so I figured I was just too little to understand it. A decade later, I watched it again with a grown-up mind, and I remember I loved it,…

Pumpkin Smoothie with Soot Sprites
These are “Makkuro-Kurosuke” from My Neighbor Totoro, and also “Susuwatari” from Spirited Away. The translated version of their names often disappoints me, because it’s just “Soot Sprites”. Soot Sprites…. I got the sentiments, but it kills the subtlety of Japanese goodness when I see the word “sprites”, -a supernatural entity in European mythology (i.e. Wikipedia). To us…

Choco-Banana Rilakkuma Toast
This week I purchased a western food called “Nutella” for the first time in my life. I’m aware that Nutella is a wildly common food throughout the US and Europe, but not in Japan. I lived in the states for seven years, yet I promised myself never to lose my Bushido (the way of a samurai)…

Vegan Ramen With a Global Warming Polar Bear
Finding ramen without meat isn’t really an easy search. But it’s always easy to wonder if you can improvise the taste of ramen using plant-based items. I make a lot of vegan and vegetarian recipes here on Yukitchen, but making the world vegan is not my mission here. That would be supremacy, and no supremacy…

Nigaoe(Caricature) Cookies
“Nigaoe(似顔絵)”(ni-gah-oh-eh) is a caricature. It’s a portrait realistically drawn by capturing or deforming the appearance and characteristics of a person. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always loved drawing nigaoe. I find people’s faces fascinating. It’s the wrinkles, the freckles, and the idiosyncrasies on their faces that I find them so beautiful. And the…

Rilakkuma Inari
In 1967, John Lennon wrote a song called “All you need is love”. He also admitted hitting women, “any women”, he said, and abandoned one of his children. He was a diligent peace activist, and wrote many songs about love and peace. He explained, “This is why I am always about peace, you see. It’s…

Rilakkuma Burger
For the past couple of years, I’ve been on a quest for making the perfect veggie burgers. It’s been a quite mission to create the burgers that have everything that we need. But I think I’m finally comfortable enough to announce to the world that I’ve reached my goal today. My veggie burgers have finally hit my high…

Neatloaf
It’s not meatloaf. It’s “Neatloaf”! Neatloaf and I first met at a restaurant called Jyoti-Bihanga in San Diego back in 2011. It was love at first “bite”. It was so juicy, so tender, and it gave me a sense of hope that I will have no problem becoming fully vegetarian one day. It was one of those…

Pacman Furofuki Daikon
You see, I gained 7 pounds around the time when I made this recipe. It’s just 7 pounds, and I know that it’s silly to worry about such a minor predicament; I have much bigger problems to deal with. But Japanese women, I believe, actually feel the same as western women about weight; we desire the…

How to make Coffee Amazake
What is “Amazake”? Amazake (甘酒) is a traditional sweet, low or non-alcohol Japanese drink made from fermented rice. We’ve been drinking this thing for more than 2000 years to date, according to my Wikipedia search. You see, I love amazake. It’s my go-to winter drink, ever since I was little. Since there was almost no alcohol, I felt…