Delicious eats, for now and the near future.
What They Say:
Episode #10: “Bad With Cooking and Bad With Bees”
The Review
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
This episode of Flying Witch has me wondering if ‘cooking class’ is actually a thing most students are required to take in college in Japan. In my hometown, Home Ec was a middle school/junior high class and not mandatory. My high school had a culinary program, but it was a tech ed track and was off limits to non-tech kids. Nao’s visceral negative reaction to having to cook anything is telling me that this class is certainly no elective for them.
I kept waiting for Nao to make a colossal blunder. No fingers are cut off, and no one ends up in the hospital due to food poisoning, despite the amount of raw meat being worked with. The kids end up making the sort of things that until I began watching anime and reading manga never would have associated with Japanese home cooking. You know, curry and the weird thing that is hamburg steak. Nao gets the toughest one, the hamburg, to make when the trio of Makoto, Kei, and her draw for it. After a careful walkthrough and some encouragement, the group makes it through the assignment and gets to eat their hard work. Makoto makes some witch’s finger cookies, and disturbs everyone their gruesome appearance during the process!
Then the whole family is off to the orchard to thin out the apple trees. (I’m a bit jealous of watching them ride in the bed of the pickup truck. Ah, nostalgia.) Insanely, they are doing the thinning when the trees are still in flower, and with only a handful of older ladies and the family actively working a very large orchard. I’m not an apple expert, but I’m pretty sure that in most orchards they only do this once the trees have set fruit, not at the blooming stage! Apparently, the older variety of apples don’t self-thin and yes, this is a thing that can be done. (I actually looked this up. Yes, I’m fact checking an anime.) I’m guessing the family orchard is all heirloom. Insanity. Kei tells Makoto about the orchard bees they use to pollinate the trees. A docile species he lets one climb on a finger and it walks over to Makoto’s… then it bites her.
Luckily, it’s a bite and not a sting. After how many times Makoto and her sister slam their heads into the low hanging branches in the orchard maybe they should be more concerned with concussions than bees.
In Summary:
This episode of Flying Witch contains absolutely no witchcraft! Just food, and lots of it. Nao is a fun character to watch, as her low-key anxiety in the face of not only witchcraft but cooking is amusing. The trip to the family orchard later makes me wonder exactly how much one of the organic apples from the farm might sell for in a Japanese store. This show is quite an education in not only fictional witchcraft but real-life culinary pursuits. That being said, I’m not about to attempt to blossom thin a ten-acre orchard anytime soon. Or even a single tree.
Episode Grade: B
Streamed by: Crunchyroll
