Minami-ke Tadaima - Episode 8

After a weekend of neglecting my 'blogging duties and (shock, horror!) enjoying myself, it's back to the anime grindstone, and what better way to get into the swing of things than by catching up on Hosoka's latest moments of insanity.

Needless to say, this insanity (and ultimately the entire episode) revolves around food, with Hosoka again daydreaming of a happy life of eating (and sweating over) curry with the Minami family.  However, perhaps there is a better opportunity at hand, that being the chance to organise a barbecue to which Haruka and company could be invited.  Unfortunately for Hosoka, it seems that everyone he knows to pad out this barbecue has already been invited to a rival event, thus shredding his plans - if only he'd done a little more digging and discovered that Haruka herself would be attending...

It's at this barbecue which we see Chiaki facing up against her old nemesis - vegetables.  Credit has to go to Natsuki and Haruka here for ensuring that she gets her fill of veggies by ensuring that their cooking is front-loaded during the barbecue process.  Although this works in the short-term, it clearly hasn't convinced Chiaki of the joys of eating vegetables, so perhaps an alternate strategy is required - how about a kid's TV programme that has an alarmingly successful way of encouraging children to eat vegetables?  Before we know it, we're being treated to a duet on the wonders of the vegetable carried out by Hosoka and Chiaki, in one of the most surreal moments ever to grace this series.

Mildly amusing though Hosoka's barbecue-based plans are, it's when this week's Minami-ke takes a dip into insanity that we end up with something truly memorable within this series, a bizarre tale that leaves almost the entire cast hypnotised into loving nothing but vegetables which of course brings out the musician within Hosoka to create the kind of thing that will probably take over YouTube for a while.  It's daft, it's stupid, but it's funny because it's both of those things - as I've said before, Minami-ke simply wouldn't work if it tried to put together crazy ideas like this all the time, but Tadaima certainly seems to be doing a good job of sprinkling them throughout the series to keep things interesting, of which I most certainly approve.