Love You...Love You Not...

Though the clam soup experiment had a small part taken from Hiroko Shimbo's The Japanese Cookbook, I decided to try an entire recipe from the book since I'd just remembered I had a bunch of dried soybeans lying around. And so, I ventured into the recipe of Soybean Lover's Rice to see if it would win me over.

In preparing it, I had high hopes as it smelled awfully enticing as it cooked away. Alas, it turned out rather bland. =( The soybeans had no soy flavor though they did have a nutty taste from toasting them which also added a bit of crunch to them. All is not a loss though. The soybean rice is actually fine as the rice accompaniment (like white rice) to main dishes yet is still able to not overpower those same main dishes. Likewise, I could see using this as the base to build on to add more flavorsa nd ingredients much like the Japanese rice dishes that are chock full of goodies (chestnuts, konnyaku, mushrooms...) and are eaten as is.