Experience the same taste and aroma as the magical characters from the fantasy film.  

These days, as we spend more and more time at home self-isolating to help stop the spread of the coronavirus, a lot of us have been brushing up on our cooking skills, adding to our repertoire of recipes with everything from homemade cheese through to tiramisu and that classic Japanese favourite, katsudon.

After rewatching a run of Studio Ghibli films recently, we decided to expand our repertoire to include anime movie meals, and the one that really set our mouths watering was the sizzling bacon and eggs from the 2004 film Howl’s Moving Castle.

To the uninitiated, this may seem like may a common breakfast meal, but for Ghibli fans, there’s something special about being able to hear, taste and smell a dish that’s enjoyed by the characters in a fantasy world we long to step into. And it’s not as simple as just cracking some eggs and popping a slice or two of bacon in a pan. It has to be done perfectly, or else it just isn’t right.

So to get the perfect bacon and eggs from Howl’s Moving Castle, we bought the ingredients below, making sure to source the thickest cuts of bacon we could find.

We were instantly impressed by the look of the bacon as we opened it, and while it was one hefty chunk of meat for one person, what we couldn’t eat in one sitting we could always keep for later.

So, we summoned Howl’s Moving Castle’s fire spirit Calcifer to the stove and he appeared beneath the pan in the form of fire to heat things up. After splashing a few tablespoons of olive oil into the frypan, we added the bacon and the scent of smoked pork filled the air, bringing the movie scene to life as we began to sense what it would feel like to be inside the magical moving castle.

The black frying pan looked exactly like the one in the film, and things were looking good until we went to crack an egg with one hand like Howl does in the movie. We still have a way to go before we perfect that technique, but we got four eggs into the pan eventually, lining everything up to resemble the fry-up in the film.

▼ The magical Ghibli movie scene becomes a real-life reality.

In the movie, Calcifer happily eats the eggshells, but we opted to put them in the compost instead. After a few minutes on a medium heat, the egg whites began to solidify, and because we like our eggs runny, we switched off the heat at this point to serve up the meal.

It looked just like the meal in the film, but unlike the movie, we decided not to bite into it the bacon with the hungry gusto of Markl, instead slicing into it daintily with a knife and fork.

While we’ve had fried eggs and bacon before, for some reason, this meal made us feel like we were really tasting the ingredients for the first time. Never before had the bacon been this thick and fragrant and the eggs this plump and glossy. It was as if Calcifer had truly added a bit of magic to the mix, and maybe he had, because when you summon the spirits of Ghibli, enchantment follows.

So next time you want to enjoy a fry-up for breakfast, why not do it with some anime flair? It’ll tide us over until we get to go out and visit Shirohige’s Cream Puff Factory for Totoro cream puff pastries and a Catbus cookie again.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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