This past Christmas, one of the little “gifts” I gave to my daughter was an Anime inspired cookbook called Cook Anime by Diana Ault. I bought it on Amazon. Since I know what she likes, I searched for an Anime inspire cookbook. I was thrilled that she genuinely loved the book and spent part of Christmas day flipping through the book and getting excited about the different recipes and the anime and manga that was the inspiration. Quite a few of the references she was already familiar with. She has already cooked a few recipes from the book, and so I consider this gift a win. I figured she’d like it since my daughter loves Anime, so I thought this cookbook would inspire her to cook a bit more. It has!
Yesterday, I told her to pick a recipe from the cookbook and create it today.
She looked through the Cook Anime cookbook and decided to prepare the recipe on page 33, Tea on Rice. The above picture is from the book. Reading the summary, the inspiration for the recipe was the Manga/Anime Bungo Stray Dogs.
It does feel strange being on the sidelines while she does the majority of the cooking. This afternoon, I was her helper, and I enjoyed assisting immensely. I must say that she did an excellent job preparing the meal.
I enjoyed the ingredients used within the dish; brown rice, green onion, tofu, garlic powder, onion powder, Himalayan sea salt, black pepper, a bit of red chili pepper for colo, and gunpowder tea. She added Braggs liquid amino acid to flavor the tofu. She let that marinate for a while before adding it to the dish. She didn’t follow the recipe explicitly; she used tofu instead of green onion, and other ingredients were substituted, but this dish inspired her.
I’ve challenged her to make one recipe per week from the book. Later this week, she said she’ll be making Rice Chahan, located on page 55 of the cookbook. The inspiration for that dish is an animated film titled Weathering with You.