Could You Master these Anime Recipes?

This is not an April Fool's Prank!

In honor of National Anime Day (April 15th) let's look at The Anime Chef Cookbook by Nadine Estero. While I have watched a fair amount of anime, I wouldn't claim I was a big fan of that genre. I recognized some of the anime referenced in this cookbook but not nearly the majority of them. We'll get back to that in a few paragraphs. I was sent a hardcover copy of this cookbook via the Amazon Vine program in exchange for reviewing it there. This article on this blog is an unexpected bonus, so no other form of compensation was received for sharing my opinions about it with you all.

The recipes are divided into four groups/chapters of unevenly numbered recipes. There are 16 Appetizers recipes, 26 Mains dishes, 15 Desserts to make, but only 8 Drinks to wash it all down. That's a total of 75 recipes, not bad for a cookbook. Of those, 6 use white chocolate, 7 use "chocolate," and 5 use cocoa powder; many of the recipes use multiple types of chocolate so in reality there are 9 chocolate related recipes or 12%. That's pretty good representation I think.

If you have experience in the kitchen, that will help you when you tackle these recipes which are more complicated than a casual anime fan may expect. If you have patience and experience you can make these. Each recipe is accompanied by a description of what was happening in the anime at the time this recipe was referenced or even made in it. Other included quotes from the anime helped me decide if the show was something I might want to check out if I was unfamiliar with it; as I mentioned, the majority of shows I did not know. I was surprised that some anime that I know focus on cooking in some way were not included, I suspect this was a matter of getting the rights to use them for this book. Each recipe includes information about the ingredients, the tools you'll need, servings it makes, the prep and cooking time, and estimated total time needed to make each one (not including shopping however).

The big negative is the images. I understand why there are drawings of the dishes/drinks instead of a photo of a finished recipe, but why not include one for each recipe then? We can't copy the drawings, but at least it would give us an idea of what the finished dish should be.