Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill

Episode 10

It amuses me to no end that the title for this week's episode of Campfire Cooking is “My Familiars Are Too Overpowered!” as if that is somehow a bold and fresh observation that Mukohda is only just now coming to understand. Beyond the whole “Magic Amazon Cooking” thing, the whole gimmick of this show is that our hapless hero has been straddled with two of the most absurdly overpowered monster friends he could have ever asked for in lieu of the usual human party members. Fel is more or less a god incarnate, and I'm pretty sure that Sui should be classified as a weapon of mass destruction. Her pew-pews may as well be bunker busters. Hell, every one of the group's day-to-day adventures would make for an excellent thrash-metal album title: “Goblin Genocide,” “Mass Cow Mutilation,” or “A Thousand Wretched Corpses Piled High for Us to Consume.”

I'm sorry, I forgot myself; the correct title would actually be “Goblin Genocide…Brought to You By Pepsi-Cola™” because this episode of Campfire Cooking makes it perfectly clear that selling out is no problem when you have the effervescent power of Pepsi™ on your side! I was most surprised to see a real-world brand name pop up in an anime since I'm so used to people guzzling down bottles of Crepsi while they eat their slices of Tominoes Pizza and browse the internet on their Woogle phones. I also can't get too mad at the brazen product placement when it managed to get me to chuckle over Fel burping up a storm. What can I say? Sometimes I am a snobbish elitist demanding nothing but perfection from my animated masterpieces, and sometimes I want to chuckle because the funny talking dog made burps and got all embarrassed. I contain multitudes.

So far as the cooking goes, I have to admit I was a bit underwhelmed this week, though not for lack of delicious recipes. It's just that the showstopper meal of the episode is…steak. Like, just a plain grilled steak with some steak sauces on top. Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to pretend that I didn't want to consume every last delectable bite of that horn-bull-whatever—especially with how absurdly detailed the animation for the sequence is, my God—but there's not a whole lot you can do to make the cooking and eating of a steak all that interesting. You just season and grill the meat, and then you eat it.

On the plus side, the other goddesses—Kisharle, Agni, and Rusalka—have finally made a proper appearance outside the little omake shorts at the end of the episode. They're not especially hilarious or fun characters, but Campfire Cooking has been in such need of something to change up its usual routines or even some new voices to hear outside of the usual three. I'll take whatever cheap shtick we can get at this point.

All in all, while this wasn't the best episode of Campfire Cooking that we've seen, it feels like a slight step up from last week's disappointing outing. We've only got a couple of weeks left to go in the season, so I hope we can at least get some cool new recipes for me to add to my repertoire. Pro Tip: That banbanji from the other week is easy as hell to make, and it's tasty as all get out. If you give any one recipe from this show a try, make it that one. I'm definitely going to add it to my permanent rotation.

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Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.