Eating With Yumi Stynes

The presenter on cooking with kids, giving up alcohol and travelling long distances for ingredients.

- Lee Tran Lam

You grew up in rural Victoria. What’s a strong food memory from that time?

I remember my parents cooking sukiyaki in our home as a winter treat for friends. The friends had never had anything like it. We’d eat on the floor with chopsticks in front of an open fire: everyone’s faces would go red from the heat and all the adults would drink way too much.

Your family would travel 350 kilometres to visit the nearest Asian grocer. What do you remember from those shopping trips?

Japanese ingredients were so precious to us because they were so hard to get! My mum, Yoshiko, loved adzuki beans: they’re used in desserts and are somewhat baffling, but her passion for them was contagious. Even now that all those ingredients are much easier to get, my mother still prefers to stock up when she goes to Tokyo. Her friends bring back great sacks of Japanese rice and it’s a valuable trade among the Japanese community of Melbourne.

You wanted to be a chef at one point. What inspired this?