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Green tea brioche with sweet beans

Much like we westerners like Japanese food, but alter it to suit our tastes, Japanese people like western food, but often with a Japanese twist. At the Uomo subway station in Tokyo, there's a little bakery full of western-style breads (OK, there are actually tons of such bakeries), where you take a tray and neatly fill it with pastries from the display (with tongs, of course). Here it is that we discovered green bread -- green tea flavored, to be precise, with ribbons of sweet azuki bean filling. And it was excellent.

In Japan, green tea and sweet beans are popular flavors for many things, but for some reason, it hasn't caught on anywhere else I've ever been. This means if you want these flavors, you'll have to make it yourself. Continue reading Green tea brioche with sweet beans ...

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Purim special: Mochi hamentaschen

When we were in Japan, one of the things we ate on a daily basis was mochi -- the squishy, sticky, gooey sweetened rice snack, generally filled with azuki beans. That was one of the things that we missed, since you can't get it anywhere in Israel, so lo and behold, what did we bring back from our last trip to the U.S.? Mochi from Chinatown. Anyway, lucky for us, I've since learned that mochi is pretty easy to make. [...]

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